William R. Hauk, Jr.

The paper seeks to address the growing inequality in wages between skilled and unskilled workers and between male and female workers in India due to a growing import surge from China. The study on wage movements of skilled versus unskilled workers helps us to understand how imports from India’s largest trade partner have contributed to relative factor returns in the country’s most abundant factor of production. The consideration of wage divergence between male and female workers helps us in determining how significant China’s trade is in addressing gender inequality in India’s labour market. Our analysis reveals that the import surge from China has minor effects on the growing wage difference between skilled and unskilled workers. However, the effect of the Chinese import surge on wage divergence between male and female workers is significant. The existing literature on the effects of international trade on India labour market is largely silent on the considered aspects.

This research investigates the effectiveness of an early academic intervention in Principles of Economics courses at a large public university. After the end of the fourth week of classes, students who fell below a 70% threshold on a performance measure, or had an attendance rate below 75%, were referred to the university’s Student Success Center for additional academic support. A referral consisted of students being informed of their status and being given optional assistance in course specific skills through tutoring, as well as training in general skills like time management and study skills. Using a regression discontinuity framework at the referral threshold, we find that the performance intervention improved student scores on common questions on the final exam by 6.5 to 7.5 percentage points for students at or near the performance threshold. The gains are particularly large for students who entered college with below average math placement scores. These results indicate that low-cost light-touch interventions may significantly affect student academic performance.

The problem of regressor endogeneity stemming from reverse casuality is one that has plagued economists working in the field of empirical economic growth for some time. This paper attempts to address the relevant magnitude of this issue in the context of growth regressions based on the Solow growth model. The paper develops a method of running Monte Carlo simulations that allows us to generate simulated data that match the moments of observed real-world data typically used in such regressions while simultaneously allowing us to impose arbitrarily high correlations between the steady-state determinants of the Solow model and the unobserved residual term of the data-generating process. After running simulations that represent a wide sample of the mathematically-possible correlations, we conclude that a between estimator or a random effects estimator will deliver a lower average absolute bias across all coefficients than alternative estimators in almost all of our simulations. Conversely, estimators that use within-country variation will generate lower biases when looking solely at rates of convergence. Furthermore, we conclude that these results are robust when restricting our sample of simulations to several subsets of the assumed parameters and to changing our assumptions about country fixed-effects terms.

We propose that neighborhoods have a measurable effect on housing prices. In theory, searching for houses by neighborhood can be seen as a heuristic process, reducing the time and effort needed to evaluate a plethora of particular local attributes that are associated with the price premium of the house. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the neighborhood’s fixed effect that picks up the time-invariant quality of the area within the framework of a hedonic housing price model. Our database encompasses more than 50,000 housing market transactions in Charleston, South Carolina. Our regression fits the data extremely well, with the neighborhood fixed effect exerting a pronounced effect on regression results and outperforming significantly alternative local areal units. The fixed effect estimates are ultimately rank-ordered to evaluate their heterogeneous effect on the housing price premium. The analysis reveals that neighborhood fixed effects capture effectively the wide range of house price premiums, from high-priced historic districts and ocean-side communities to low-price, poverty-stricken areas damaged by urban redevelopment. In addition, our approach to using spatial fixed effect estimates as a tool to measure the brand effect of regions can be used to assess the value of regional identity in other contexts like industry location and migration.

The second important contribution we make to the literature is a new method of estimating the Moran’s I in large data sets. Based on our simplified Moran’s I tests, we show that spatial dependence is effectively eliminated when the neighborhood fixed effects are added to the model. This original econometric tool can be applied to a wide range of urban and regional research.

This paper investigates whether culture and history impacts the spatial allocation of foreign direct investment (FDI). The importance of culture is well documented in both the international business and economics literature; however, the causal impact of culture on the location of FDI has been difficult to determine. In this study, we implement a spatial regression discontinuity design to test for discontinuous changes in investment at the historical border of the Habsburg Empire. There is evidence that the empire had a long-lasting impact on culture, trust, and institutions in its territories. We propose that countries sharing a former affiliation with the empire will be more likely to invest in each other today. The former empire had a border which ran through several present-day countries. Cities located on either side of this historical border have shared common institutions for the last 100 years. This unique setting allows us to identify a cultural effect that is separate from institutions, nationality, religion, and language. The results suggest that there are between 0.24 and 0.32 additional investments per 10,000 individuals coming from Habsburg-affiliated countries in the former empire territories of Romania and Serbia today.