Browsing by Author "Sickles, Robin"
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Item A History of Keyboard Hand Division: Note (Re)Distribution in Keyboard Music from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century(2021-04-23) Clark, Michael; Al-Zand, Karim; Ward-Griffin, Danielle; Sickles, RobinThis thesis considers the history of redistribution, the practice of altering the hand assignment of one or more notes, in keyboard music from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Chapter 1 explores methods of notating and executing hand division in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the writings of contemporary performers and composers. Keyboard music appeared in two broad categories of notational formats: those that indicate hand distribution (“prescriptive”), such as the two-staff Italian intavolatura, and those that do not (“non-prescriptive”), including open score and Spanish and German tablature. Performers using non-prescriptive formats considered factors such as equal division of labor, wide spans, and ornamentation when determining which hand plays what, important precursors to the principles guiding the practice of redistribution. Chapter 2 traces two parallel trends in eighteenth-century keyboard music described by C.P.E. Bach. He asserts that the notation of three or more voices across two staves does not represent the hand division required to play them, establishing a particular freedom of fingering in polyphonic music. In contrast, Bach emphasizes the care he took to notate hand distribution in his own music through changes in stem direction and clef. Chapter 3 considers how Chopin and Liszt approached the division of notes in their own works. As composers, they were prescriptive, using multiple notational strategies to clarify the intended distribution of the notes between the hands, but as teachers, they were flexible. Chopin’s own markings in his students’ scores and Liszt’s comments in master classes reveal that they suggested alternative note distributions in their own compositions. Chapter 4 examines the history of “practical” or “instructive” editions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using Beethoven’s piano sonatas as a case study. I survey the uses of redistributions in five editions of the sonatas: those of Sigmund Lebert/Hans von Bülow, Karl Klindworth, Moritz Moszkowski, Alfredo Casella, and Artur Schnabel. My analysis reveals five broad applications of alternative distributions that are common to each, representing a strong consensus for how redistribution was used by pianists of this era.Item An economic analysis of postrelease behavior among Texas felons(1989) Hissong, Rodney Virgil; Sickles, RobinDuring the 1980's the majority of states were mandated by court order to reduce the overcrowded conditions of their prisons. The response of some was to release prisoners in an ad hoc fashion and to use probation as an alternative to prison. The central issue of this dissertation was the efficient allocation of resources within the criminal justice system. Specifically, four questions were addressed. What factors determined the sanction? What criminal and socio-economic characteristics distinguished successful ex-inmates? What criminal and socio-economic characteristics distinguished successful probationers. Were criminal types that were more successful under one sanction being punished via the other sanction? A sample of 740 convicted felons from Harris County (Houston), Texas were tracked from January and February, 1980 through June 1986. Some were placed on probation while the others were sent to prison and later released. Logit analysis was used to estimate the effect of criminal and socio-economic covariates on the probability of prison relative to the probability of probation. Empirical results suggested that black offenders who were convicted of personal injury crimes or theft offenses were more likely to be sent to prison than placed on probation. Offenders were more likely to be placed on probation if they had a job and had been released on bond. Duration analysis was used to estimate hazard rates. These were used to link criminal justice and socio-economic factors to the timing and probability of recidivating. The relative chance of failure decreased for ex-inmates who had been incarcerated less than the average prison term and then were released to a halfway house or to family members. Black first time offenders who sought counseling for substance abuse problems were the most likely successful probationers. Police presence was a deterrent and increased police productivity improved the chances of detection. The relative deprivation hypothesis was supported. Policy recommendations included extending the length of probation, reducing the length of prison terms, and requiring closer supervision for all upon re-entry into society.Item Competition in physician private practices(2007) Gunning, Timothy Scott; Sickles, RobinThis dissertation is comprised of three separate essays that share a similar theme: physician private practices. The first essay revisits prior research that has proposed a general framework for physician cost function estimation. The econometric specification is a multi-product cost function, and my model addresses and deals with many measurement problems and data complications in physician practice surveys. In particular, I expand upon existing theory to include those practices that yield zero outputs. This modification allows allow me to utilize a more representative and larger sample. The results of my analysis confirm that previous estimates have yielded a downward bias in reported marginal cost estimates, a point often speculated in the literature but not formally addressed empirically. The second essay uses the econometric specification from the first essay to develop a means for testing market power in physician private practices. Using the 1998 American Medical Association Physician Socioeconomic Monitoring Survey, I test the hypothesis of physician collusion in an oligopolistic setting for five fields of specialty. The collusion hypothesis is tested in a traditional conjectural-variation framework that reveals physicians are not highly collusive. However, a Lerner index shows that physicians do possess a high degree of monopoly power, consistent with many of the claims brought forward by the Department of Justice, primarily due to consumer price insensitivity. The third essay uses the marginal cost estimates of the second paper to revisit the Harberger partial equilibrium approach for computing welfare loss. Deadweight loss estimates are computed by physician, practice, and office visit. The reported losses are indicative of a loss in consumer surplus from the monopoly power that physicians possessed in 1998. The third essay concludes by showing that significant price markups led to substantial losses in welfare by the consumer and third-party payer.Item Convergence hypothesis: The Latin American experience(1994) Orozco Ruiz, Fernando; Sickles, RobinThis dissertation demonstrates conclusively that there is strong convergence on per capita GDP (RGDP) levels among 13 Latin American countries. However, when an extended sample that includes 18 Latin American countries is considered, there is no convergence on RGDP levels. The sample that includes 18 countries is comprised of the biggest economies in Latin America. The reduced sample of 13 countries is determined by the exclusion of the 5 most politically unstable economies from the extended group. Estimating an econometric model of relative economic growth shows that the differences in growth rates among the 13 economies are explained by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) catch-up and by the growth rates of factor intensities. Moreover, the results support the fact that TFP catch-up has been a stable feature among these countries in the post-war period. Following these results, a decomposition of average (logarithmic) growth rates of RGDP of both samples is presented. Exploratory empirical evidence bearing on a set of macroeconomic hypotheses relating to economic growth across 13 Latin American nations is presented.Item Demand for health services in Colombia: The choice of provider by women of child-rearing age(1991) Escobar, Maria Luisa; Sickles, RobinThis research analyzes the factors influencing choice and the determinants of women's health services demand. Demand for health services in Colombia is practically unexplored, and there appear to be no studies of demand for health services by women of child rearing age in Colombia. The Colombian National Health Study of 1980 (Estudio Nacional de Salud-1980) is the data base used, supplemented by hospital data from the Ministry of Health. After a description of the Colombian Health System, the choice between traditional and modern care is studied for prenatal care, and for child's delivery assistance, emphasizing differences among insured and non-insured women. The first part of the study estimates demand schedules through a logistic specification. The choice of institutional setting for child's delivery assistance, conditional upon the prior decision of using modern care, is studied through a nested multinomial logit specification for women in different regions of the country and for urban and rural women as well. Expected prices for a delivery are estimated for all choices women face. Only few recent studies have found demand for modern health services to be price elastic and dependent on income level; this is also the case in some of the regions of Colombia. Moreover, demand for health services becomes less price elastic as income increases. Demand for Private care is generally more price elastic than demand for other types of care, and in some cases demand for Public care is significantly price elastic at lower income levels. Lower income women rely on Public hospitals when they have decided against traditional care. Then, price changes for Public care would have larger welfare effects on lower income groups. Urban women of high income groups often use Public care, indicating that government subsidies are favoring better-off sectors of the population. Meanwhile, rural women rely heavily on home care, even at higher income levels. A more rational price system for services at social security hospitals would not reduce significantly women's welfare; higher prices would help to provide better quality services and/or permit cost recovery for those institutions which very often find themselves in financial trouble.Item Essays in economic growth: Catching up and leaping ahead(1998) Hultberg, Patrik Tomas; Sickles, RobinI formalize growth ideas that go beyond rates of factor accumulation to also include the fact that countries may differ in technology and institutions. The first essay explores the empirical finding that cross-country convergence is also accompanied by significant relative income shifts (leapfrogging). Three measures of leapfrogging are suggested and applied to OECD countries (and the World). The results show high rank persistence annually, but display more mobility as time is extended. This indicates that rank movements exist and are not purely random. To determine if different accumulation rates can explain this finding, the human capital augmented Solow model is simulated with and without a random disturbance. The mobility measures from the simulations can be made to closely approximate the OECD data, but the simulated growth paths are quite different from the observed. The second essay presents a modified version of the Solow-Swan growth model which considers the possibility of adoption of technical knowledge from abroad and possible inefficiency caused by institutional rigidities. Adoption of technology becomes one mechanism through which the effective capital stock of a nation increases. The new model slightly modifies standard results for nations' steady states and rates of convergence. More importantly, it allows for quite different convergence paths. In the third essay, I estimate the model with panel data using methods consistent with the dynamic frontier literature. The model is estimated for three regions: Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Follower countries benefit significantly from the technology gap to the leader nation and countries differ in average inefficiency levels. The estimated average inefficiency levels seem consistent with common beliefs and are significantly explained by institutional variables such as bureaucratic efficiency and political and civil rights.Item Essays in structural parametric and semiparametric estimation of auction and agency models(2003) Gonzalez, Raul Sergio; Sickles, RobinAn analysis of strategic behavior and consumer surplus in eBay auctions. This essay presents structural estimates of bidding behavior in eBay computer monitor auctions. The entry of bidders is taken as exogenous and treated as another parameter in the estimation. The source of our data is the eBay website. We verify that private values have a log normal distribution, and use our estimates to reject the use of Jump Bidding or "Snipe or War" bidding and construct structural estimates of consumer surplus. Ex-ante bidding rules, entry and private value estimation in eBay auctions. This essay measures the relation between the ex-ante bidding rules set by the seller and the bidders' entry process. With the assumption of endogenous entry we study sellers' optimal choices of bidding rules such as reserve price, use of secret reserve price, auction length and the decision to make public the characteristics of the monitors. We model the entry of bidders as a Poisson process. We keep the assumptions of independent private values and identical risk neutral bidders. Modeling entry as endogenous in the SNLLS methodology improves the estimation of the private valuation. However the difference in the coefficients' magnitude as well as in the minimized objective function value is minimal if compared with the estimation assuming exogenous entry. The use of reserve price is an effective mechanism to deter entry. Shorter auctions have fewer bidders. "Dividends and the agency cost of free cash flows" . This essay analyzes the existence of incomplete contracts (agency problem) as an alternative explanation for the documented positive relationship between dividend increase and firm value. A leading explanation for the positive market reaction surrounding the announcement of dividend increases is that dividend payments mitigate the agency conflict between managers and shareholders. One implication of this theory is that those firms whose managers are less (more) entrenched should experience a stronger (weaker) market reaction around the announcement of dividend increases. Consistent with these predictions, we find an inverse U-shape relation between the market reaction to dividend increases and the level of managerial ownership in the firm.Item Essays on Commercial Banking: Survival, Performance, and Heterogeneous Technologies(2011) Almanidis, Pavlos; Sickles, RobinIn the first chapter, we focus on explaining the U.S. commercial banking failures during the recent financial crisis. We employ the semi-parametric mixture hazard model (MHM) with both continuous and discrete time specifications to first, distinguish between troubled and healthy banks and second, to estimate the probability and the timing of their failure. We combine the MHM with the stochastic frontier model (SFM) to explore the role of managerial inefficiency on a bank's longer term viability. We find that the discrete-time MHM which takes the managerial inefficiencies into account fits well and dominates other competing specifications by accurately predicting the timing of failures both in and out of the sample. The second chapter explores a new class of flexible cross-sectional parametric SFMs that impose an unobservable bound on the inefficiency term. We consider 11 doubly truncated normal, truncated half-normal, and truncated exponential distributions to model the inefficiencies. We extend the models to the panel data setting and specify a time-varying inefficiency bound. We apply these models to analyze the performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry during 1984-2009. In the third chapter, we address the issue of the "wrong" skewness of the least squares residuals that often arises in applied studies using the traditional SFM. Findings of "wrong" skewness imply that the SFM is misspecified and all firms are fully efficient. Based on doubly truncated normal distribution that displays both positive and negative skewness, we prove that "wrong" skewness does not necessarily imply that the SFM model is misspecified. The fourth chapter investigates the existence of heterogeneous technologies in the U.S. commercial banking industry through the threshold effects estimation techniques, modified to allow for time-varying effects. We employ the total assets as a threshold variable and determine seven distinct technology-groups. In the fifth chapter, we describe the commercial banking data that are extracted from the quarterly Consolidated Reports of Condition and Income (Call Reports). We detail the construction of the key variables used in this thesis, which mainly contain output quantities, input quantities and prices, bank-specific structural and geographical characteristics, as well as a number of measures of risk.Item Essays on domestic and international airline economics with some bootstrap applications(1999) Postert, Anthony Kenneth; Sickles, RobinWe present several essays on topics in airline economics. The first essay presents a model of U.S. aircraft demand. This joint model of demand for and supply of commercial air service allow us to simulate the effects of emerging technologies in engine design capabilities and in aircraft capacities on airline fleet sizes. The second essay examines the possibility that relatively high prices in the European airline industry are due to market power. We examine the market conduct of firms in the European airline industry and find little evidence that competitive pricing is violated on average. In the third essay, we present an integrated model of world aircraft demand. We estimate the demand for both passenger and cargo services and tie this demand to cost analysis of the carriers. Our cost model is used to generate derived demand schedules for the factors of production, in particular flying capital. We take a brief look at bootstrap techniques in the forth essay. Bootstrapping has become a powerful technique for estimating sampling distributions of statistics since its introduction by Efron (1979). We discuss the bootstrapping procedure and present some small sample evidence of its effectiveness through Monte Carlo experiments. The fifth essay applies the bootstrap to a model of U.S. aircraft demand. We bootstrap confidence intervals for Allen-Uzawa partial elasticities of substitution and price elasticities. We find prediction intervals for forecasts of airline's fleet size using the bootstrap. The sixth essay suggests an application of leapfrogging measures to the airline industry. A detailed look at Hultberg and Postert (1998) is presented. Three rank mobility measures are presented and used to determine the amount of leapfrogging in the data. A human capital augmented Solow-Swan model is fit to the data and we use bootstrapping to calibrate the model.Item Essays on Financial Markets: Bank Efficiency, Risk Taking and Contagion(2018-08-09) Ding, Dong; Sickles, RobinThe global financial crisis 2007-2008 has brought many issues into the light and led to a profound questioning about the existing prudential regulations. This dissertation consists of three essays on banking supervision and systemic risk with common themes which are: (i) to evaluate the effectiveness of capital regulations, (ii) to provide important insights to regulators and banks for understanding and monitoring risks, and (iii) to suggest new techniques and frameworks to improve micro and macro prudential supervisions. The three chapters attempt to achieve these goals from different angles. Chapter 1 is an empirical study assessing how capital regulations impact U.S. banks' capital ratios, risk-taking and performance (proxied by the cost efficiency). The analysis is based on standard models taken from the banking and finance literature but with added attention paid to specifying possible cost inefficiencies in the provision of intermediation services. Chapter 2 moves into more methodological innovations of Chapter 1 research questions and focuses on a spatial panel analysis of financial interconnectness of U.S. banks. Chapter 3 employs network approaches to examine contagion within the financial network, which are able to provide visual and analytical representation of exposures not evident in standard economic models.Item Essays on human and physical capital investments in developing countries: educational choices, vocational aspirations, and procurement auction efficiencies(2021-04-16) Prudencio, Daniel A.; Sickles, RobinWhen allocating contracts, governments decide between exercising hiring discretion or allowing higher competition without firm selection. Ex-ante, it is not clear which allocation format leads to better outcomes. The trade-off depends in part on the government’s ability to select the best firms when restricting competition and on the probability that this practice leads to corruption. In the first chapter, I study the allocation of street pavement contracts in Mexico. I combine auction methods with a productivity analysis to indirectly test whether local governments select firms with low excess costs when restricting competition. This indirect approach allows the monitoring of contract allocation in settings with little information on firm reputation. I find that firms selected to settings with less competition have lower costs in complex pavement contracts, but higher costs in simple ones. Contrary to the current practice, the results suggest that the government would benefit from using public auctions for simple pavement contracts. The next two chapters study investment in human capital, where I study the impact of a child sponsorship program on psychological constructs and educational aspirations. Previous work finds positive effects from international child sponsorship programs on educational attainment, employment, and adult income. I study whether elevating aspirations and socio-emotional skills among sponsored children work as mechanisms through which sponsorship programs impact children. For a sample of 2,022 children in Kenya, Indonesia, and Mexico, I use an age-eligibility rule applied during program rollout to identify the sponsorship effect. I document that sponsorship increased indices of self-esteem (0.25 std. dev.), optimism (0.26 std. dev.), aspirations (0.29 std. dev.), expected grade of completed education (0.43 years), and actual grade completion by 0.56 years. For the Mexican subsample, I further study both the impact of subjective expected educational returns on aspirations and the correlation between selection to sponsorship and the sponsorship effect. I find that the average treatment effect on the treated is positive and consistent with previous studies, although not statistically significant. The sponsorship effect is higher for children most likely to be selected to the program. Finally, I document that children in rural settings have realistic, although heterogeneous income expectations, and present clear gender gaps.Item ESSAYS ON MULTICATEGORY DEPENDENCE MODELS OF CONSUMER CHOICE(2014-04-03) Chaudhry, Alexander; Pasquali, Matteo; Seetharaman, P. B.; Sickles, Robin; Borle, SharadThis research concentrates on understanding the dynamic choice behavior of households using econometric models; specifically the influence of promotional campaigns and cross-category dependencies on purchase incidence outcomes. In the first section, we empirically estimate the expected basket-level demand effects and, therefore, the expected store profit effects of three different types of retailer targeted coupon campaigns used by a national supermarket retail chain. The three types of campaigns differ in terms of household-level personalization. One campaign employs a one-to-one approach by targeting a set of selected households with a unique bundle of coupons personalized to that household’s preferences (high personalization). Another campaign promotes a bundle of brands around a theme (i.e., back-to-school) relevant to the household (medium personalization). The third type provides a limited number of coupons for one brand in a single category relevant to the consumer (low personalization). We build and estimate an econometric model of a household’s contemporaneous purchase incidence outcomes in 28 product categories, together with a household-level store choice model. In terms of relative efficacy, we find that theme-based coupons (medium personalization) lead to more incremental expected retailer profits for a small number of coupons (e.g. 5-7) when dropped in a single category (e.g. fresh vegetables). However, due to higher degrees of freedom, one-to-one coupons (high personalization) generate an even greater expected retailer profit when bundling coupons across a large number of categories (e.g. 20). In the second section, we attempt to advance the literature on multi-category demand models by modeling cross-category dependencies in households’ purchase incidence outcomes. We propose an extended version of the Multivariate Logit Model of Russell and Peterson (2000) that enables the estimation of higher-order cross-category dependencies. We document both positive and negative higher order cross-category dependences in consumer demand. This systematic demand structure analysis allowed us to find a counterintuitive bundle of hot dogs, non-cola beverages and toilet paper which generated the highest expect revenues. The results from our studies provide insights to retailers about the value of investing in more personalized promotional efforts, and with a detailed cross category glimpse of where such value is gained.Item Essays on nonstationary time series(2008) Jiang, Bibo; Sickles, RobinIn the first chapter, we consider the logistic regression model with an integrated regressor. In particular, we derive the limit distributions of the nonlinear least squares (NLS) estimators and their t-ratios. It is shown that the NLS estimators are generally not efficient. Moreover, the t-ratios for the level parameters have limit distributions that are non-normal and dependent upon nuisance parameters, due to the asymptotic correlation between the innovations of the regressor and the regression errors. We propose an efficient NLS procedure to deal with the inefficiency of the estimators and inferential difficulty. The new NLS procedure yields estimators that are efficient and have asymptotically normal t-ratios. The second chapter considers a state space model with integrated latent variables. The model provides an effective framework to specify, test and extract common stochastic trends in a set of integrated time series. The standard Kalman filter is used to estimate the model, and the asymptotic theory of the Kalman filter is derived. In particular, we establish the consistency and asymptotic mixed normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, and validate the conventional inference for this class of models. Moreover, we derive a trace statistic to test the number of common stochastic trends in a system of integrated time series. The asymptotic distribution of the trace statistic is derived as normal. Chapter 3 provides an empirical illustration by investigating common stochastic trends of interest rates with different maturities.Item Essays on parametric and nonparametric modeling and estimation with applications to energy economics(1999) Gao, Weiyu; Brown, Bryan W.; Sickles, RobinMy dissertation research is composed of two parts: a theoretical part on semiparametric efficient estimation and an applied part in energy economics under different dynamic settings. The essays are related in terms of their applications as well as the way in which models are constructed and estimated. In the first essay, efficient estimation of the partially linear model is studied. We work out the efficient score functions and efficiency bounds under four stochastic restrictions---independence, conditional symmetry, conditional zero mean, and partially conditional zero mean. A feasible efficient estimation method for the linear part of the model is developed based on the efficient score. A battery of specification test that allows for choosing between the alternative assumptions is provided. A Monte Carlo simulation is also conducted. The second essay presents a dynamic optimization model for a stylized oilfield resembling the largest developed light oil field in Saudi Arabia, Ghawar. We use data from different sources to estimate the oil production cost function and the revenue function. We pay particular attention to the dynamic aspect of the oil production by employing petroleum-engineering software to simulate the interaction between control variables and reservoir state variables. Optimal solutions are studied under different scenarios to account for the possible changes in the exogenous variables and the uncertainty about the forecasts. The third essay examines the effect of oil price volatility on the level of innovation displayed by the U.S. economy. A measure of innovation is calculated by decomposing an output-based Malmquist index. We also construct a nonparametric measure for oil price volatility. Technical change and oil price volatility are then placed in a VAR system with oil price and a variable indicative of monetary policy. The system is estimated and analyzed for significant relationships. We find that oil price volatility displays a significant negative effect on innovation. A key point of this analysis lies in the fact that we impose no functional forms for technologies and the methods employed keep technical assumptions to a minimum.Item Essays on semiparametric estimation and structural modeling with applications in the banking industry(1997) Adams, Robert Matthew; Sickles, RobinNew semiparametric panel estimation methods have been developed, which make minimal distributional or functional form assumptions on the model. These estimators are illustrated in an efficiency analysis of the banking industry. This analysis finds that functional form and distributional assumptions are important in efficiency estimation. Moreover, models of time varying efficiency are relevant and indicate productivity movements in the banking industry.Item Essays on structural modeling using nonparametric and parametric methods with applications in the United States banking industry(2000) Jayasuriya, Sameera Ruwan; Sickles, RobinIn this dissertation, structural models that utilize parametric and nonparametric approaches are developed that are used to measure competition and cost efficiency in the US banking industry (1990--96). Competition in loan and deposit markets is studied using the method of conjectural variations (Bresnahan, 1982). The results indicate that market imperfections present are negligible, and that loan and deposit services are competitively priced. Cost efficiency is studied using a stochastic cost frontier in the spirit of Bauer (1990), and cost increases above optimal levels are assigned to technical and allocative inefficiencies. The results indicate that technical inefficiency is the major cause for deviations from the cost frontier and allocative inefficiency is declining during this period.Item Essays on the economic history of slavery(2008) Dacus, Chad; Sickles, RobinIn the first chapter of this dissertation, rates of return derived from the institution of slavery are adjusted for risk and compared with other antebellum investments through the directional distance function. Since multiple investments often occupy the efficient frontier, bootstrap confidence intervals of the directional distances fail to indicate a statistically significant difference between the investments unless one choice dominates in both risk and return or more restrictive assumptions concerning the relationship between risk and rate of return are adopted. Through the use of super-efficiency scores, we find that the institution of slavery outperformed the other investments for the periods 1830-1835 and 1848-1860, but slavery did not perform as well as the other investments during the severe economic downturn following the Panic of 1837. We conclude that the institution of slavery was a superior antebellum investment but was more cyclical than other investments. In the second chapter, the number of bidders in New Orleans slave auctions is estimated by period. Auctions were legally required in New Orleans estate sales during the 1800s. Since records of slave transactions were carefully documented, we are afforded the opportunity to test whether the number of bidders increased or decreased during this period using well-developed empirical methods. Auction theory tells us that the winning bid in a private-value auction will increase if an additional bidder is added. Therefore, if the number of bidders increased between 1840 and 1860, this would suggest that westward expansion was influential in the increase in average price of slaves during the same period. If the number of bidders decreased, the only remaining argument would be that slaves were simply becoming more valuable assets. We find that the number of bidders did not increase over the period, so we can argue that slaves were becoming more valuable and that the increase in price was not merely a frontier effect that could not be sustained. Our results fortify the conclusion that slavery was not going to die due to economic obsolescence, and that the Civil War was a necessity to settle the future of slavery in the United States.Item Essays on Voter and Legislative Behavior in Coalitional Democracies(2012-09-05) Fortunato, David; Martin, Lanny W.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Carroll, Royce A.; Sickles, RobinIn this dissertation I examine the reciprocal relationship between voters and political parties in coalitional democracies in three essays. First, I investigate how voters alter their perceptions of political parties in response to their participation in coalition cabinets. I argue that voters view coalition participation as broad and wide-ranging policy compromise and update their perceptions of the policy positions of cabinet participants accordingly. I find that voters perceive coalition partners as more similar than parties that are not currently coalesced, all else equal. In the following essay, I examine the electoral repercussions of this shift in perceptions by proposing a model of voting that considers coalition policy-making. I argue that voters will equate the policy compromise they perceive in the cabinet with a failure to rigorously pursue the policies they were promised and that voters who perceive compromise will punish the incumbent. The data reveals that this perception may cost incumbent cabinets about 2.5% of their vote share. Finally, I move from the electorate to the legislature to investigate if and how these perceptions condition legislative behavior. The previous essays suggest that coalition parties have substantial motivation to differentiate themselves from their partners in cabinet when voters perceive them as becoming more similar. I test this argument by examining partisan behavior in legislative review. The data show that coalition partners who are perceived as more similar are more likely to amend one another’s legislation.Item Estimating the Effect of Paywalls in Media Economics: An Application of Empirical IO, Machine Learning, and NLP Methods(2020-04-15) Ngo, Van Thi Tuong; Sickles, RobinMedia firms such as newspapers compete in a two-sided market, one between content providers and news consumers while the other between content providers and advertisers. I examine the impact of online subscription and advertisement revenues on newspapers' endogenous content choice. An analytical model demonstrates that switching from a subscription to advertising revenue model changes firms' horizontally differentiated content choice. Additionally, I provide an empirical analysis of U.S. digital newspapers and evaluate a structural model of supply and demand. An application of web scraping, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning for data collection and data analysis is presented. The counterfactual estimation suggests that a subscription-based model improves firms' profits.Item Geographic spillovers : learning spillovers in wartime shipbuilding & pricing spillovers in natural gas markets(2009) Blazek, David; Sickles, Robin; Brown, Bryan; Gruber, IraThe role of geography in two distinct economic settings is considered. In the first case, the impact of geographic distance is assessed as it relates to the benefit of cumulative productive experience (the ‘learning curve’) in the manufacturing of World War 2 Liberty ships. Unit level production from the period is exploited to consider whether worker experience is transferred and persisted across different geographical regions. Furthermore, the relative impact of both proximal and distant simultaneous production is considered. These findings are then considered in a technical efficiency frontier framework to determine both the cause of inefficiencies in shipyards as well as to answer interesting historical questions about the nature of relative proficiency in production of the major regions of the United States. The conclusions are that there is an inverse relationship between the strength of spillovers and distance. Furthermore, temporary suspensions in output of an assembly line drive up labor requirements on subsequent units. Finally, increases in labor turnover decrease subsequent labor inefficiency. In the second case, time series analysis is employed to consider pricing spillovers in the North American natural gas markets. Four distinct types of gas markets are considered: intra-regional, inter-regional, forward, and pairwise spot to forward. Each market is considered in a cointegrated framework to reveal the degree of market integration in gas markets. The implications of the long-term relationships estimated are explained. Furthermore, questions of the proper direction of causality and of market exclusion and exogeneity are tested and answered. The results support the hypothesis of a firmly integrated national market for natural gas. This integration is very strong both regionally and nationally in spot markets. In forward markets, integration is still present and strong, but is slightly weaker than spot markets. Lastly, there are strong common trends across the dimension of time in each of the markets considered.