"Gender and the Influence of Peer Alcohol Consumption on Adolescent Sexual Activity," working paper, University of Oregon. request pdf view abstract
Detrimental outcomes have been associated with adolescent sexual activity. Through this analysis, I consider the alcohol consumption of opposite-gender peers as explanatory to the propensity for adolescent youth to engage in sexual intercourse. I demonstrate that the alcohol consumption of male peers increases female sexual activity. This relationship is robust to school fixed effects, cannot be explained by broader cohort effects, or general anti-social behaviors by male peers. In the end, it is appealing to consider the potential that male-peer alcohol consumption is driving female sexual activity causatively. There is no evidence that male sexual activity responds to female-peer alcohol consumption.
We empirically examine whether there is discernable variation in the matriculation patterns of low-income students at public flagship institutions in the United States around changes in institutional financial-aid policies that target resident, low-income students with need-based aid. While enrollment responses cannot be attributed to these programs, we do find that institutions that introduce income-targeted aid subsequently enroll financially needier and geographically more-distant students. These findings imply that ``improved" access may actually displace some needy students in favor of others.
We empirically model performance in the final round of a multiple-round tournament as a spatially autoregressive process, allowing us to sign and quantify the endogenous interactions between competitors. Doing so speaks to significant regularities in the data that suggest that a player's own performance generally tends to improve with the improving performance of competitors. However, we also find significant asymmetries in the interdependency of player performance that suggest that social interactions, even those found in a fairly straightforward game, can be rather complex. For example, while the positive complementarity in performance is particularly strong between tied players, own performance suffers in response to improving performance of lagging, lower-ability competitors.
"Changes in Organizational Leadership: What Type of Executive Turnover Matters?" Working Paper, University of Oregon (with Jack Barron and Dmitriy Chulkov).
forthcoming "Corruption, Decentralization and Yardstick Competition," Economics of Governance, (with Oz Dincer and Chris Ellis). view abstract
Several empirical studies have found a negative relationship between corruption and the decentralization of the powers to tax and spend. In this paper we explain this phenomenon using a model of Yardstick Competition. Using data on federal corruption-related convictions in U.S. states we propose and test a spatial autoregressive model of corruption, providing new evidence in support of the theoretical findings.
forthcoming "Modeling Retention at a Large Public University: Can At-Risk Students be Identified Early Enough to Treat?" Research in Higher Education, (with Larry D. Singell). view abstract
We examine the extent to which readily available data at a large public university can be used to a priori identify at-risk students who may benefit from targeted retention efforts. Although it is possible to identify such students, there remains an inevitable tradeoff in any resource allocation between not treating the students who are likely to exit without treatment and treating students who are likely not to exit in the absence of the treatment. At-risk students are found to remain at risk throughout their college career. Moreover, conditional on exiting the institution, the degree to which the student was at risk is predictive of whether the student subsequently re-enrolls elsewhere and the type of institution this re-enrollment occurs at. In this context, we discuss how retention policies relate to insuring the initial match is appropriate, recognizing that some attrition can be in keeping with the broad social interest.
2008 "Spacey Parents: Spatial Autoregressive Patterns in Inbound FDI," S. Brakman and H. Garretsen (eds.), Foreign Direct Investment and the Multinational Enterprise, MIT Press (with Bruce Blonigen, Ron Davies and Helen Naughton). (An earlier version appears as NBER WP11466.)
2008 "Work Hard, Not Smart: Stock Options in Executive Compensation," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (with Jack Barron). view abstract
This paper examines the optimal equity compensation for executives. When executives choose a level of effort to devote to gathering information and a criterion for acting on the information gathered, the optimal exercise price involves a tradeoff; a higher exercise price moves the executive's decision criterion away from first-best but provides leverage that moves the executive's effort toward first-best. This tradeoff depends on a variety of factors, including the potential influence of decisions on firm value. We document empirical regularities consistent with the theory, such as that options are relatively less prevalent in the equity compensation of more-senior executives.
2008 "Consumer and Competitor Reactions: Evidence from a Retail-Gasoline Field Experiment," International Journal of Industrial Organization (with Jack Barron and John Umbeck). view abstract
In response to a price change by a single seller, it is common for the density of sellers in the market to influence both the quantity response of consumers and the price response of other sellers. Using field experiment data collected around a series of exogenously imposed price changes we find that an individual retailer with a larger number of competitors faces a more-responsive demand. This finding is fundamental to a predicted inverse relationship between market prices and the number of competitors. We also examine the reaction of rival stations to exogenous price changes, and find that the magnitude of a competitor's response is inversely related to the density of stations in the market.
2007 "Spatial Competition and the Price of College," Economic Inquiry (with Dan McMillen and Larry Singell). view abstract
This paper provides the first evidence that universities compete directly on price, and that the market for students depends on the proximity of competitors. Exploiting detailed data from private U.S. universities, price competition is tested by introducing geographic proximity into a spatial-autoregressive tuition model. Standard spatial models show that list and net tuition are inversely related to distance between institutions, consistent with price competition in higher education. An extension to the spatial econometrics literature relaxes a constraint that estimated spatial relationships are common across all observations, implying that spatial effects differ across classes of institutions.
2007 "Money for Nothing? The Impact of Changes in the Pell Grant Program on Institutional Revenues and the Placement of Needy Students," Education Finance and Policy (with Brad Curs and Larry Singell). view abstract
Using new institution-level data we assess the impact of changing federal aid levels on institution-level Pell revenues. Using various policy instruments associated with Pell generosity, we quantify the sensitivity of institutional Pell revenues to the generosity of the Pell Grant program. In general, we find an elastic response of institutional Pell revenues with respect to the maximum Pell award, where other policy instruments associated with Pell generosity are found to have an inelastic or zero impact. We also document significant asymmetries across institutional selectivity, both in magnitude and in terms of which channel accounts for the measured sensitivity - award values directly or institutional enrollment. In the end, exogenous changes in the Federal Pell Grant program are found to correlate strongly with changes in the distribution of needy students and revenues across institution quality.
2007 "FDI in Space: Spatial Autoregressive Relationships in Foreign Direct Investment," European Economic Review (with Bruce Blonigen, Ron Davies and Helen Naughton). view abstract (An earlier version appears as NBER WP10939.)
There are a number of theoretical reasons why FDI into a host country may depend on the FDI in proximate countries. Such spatial interdependence has been largely ignored by the empirical FDI literature, with only a couple recent papers accounting for such issues in their estimation. This paper conducts a general examination of spatial interactions in empirical FDI models using data on US outbound FDI activity. We find that estimated relationships of traditional determinants of FDI are surprisingly robust to inclusion of terms to capture spatial interdependence, even though such interdependence is estimated to be significant. However, we find that both the traditional determinants of FDI and the estimated spatial interdependence are quite sensitive to the sample of countries one examines.
2007 "The Pell Program at Thirty Years," in J.C. Smart (ed.), Higher Education Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. XXII, 281-334. New York: Springer (with Brad Curs and Larry Singell).
2006 "Hope for the Pell? Institutional Effects in the Intersection of Merit-Based and Need-Based Aid," Southern Economic Journal (with Brad Curs and Larry Singell). view abstract
Prior empirical evidence finds that general enrollment effects of merit-aid programs such as the Georgia Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarship are large and significant, while the effects of need-based aid programs such as the Pell grant are modest and often insignificant. This paper uses new panel data on Pell awards to examine the influence of the Georgia HOPE scholarship on needy-student enrollments. We demonstrate that the introduction of merit aid in Georgia generally improves the college access of needy students and has been leveraged into greater federal Pell assistance. While institution-specific increases in both Pell enrollment and funding are largest at two-year and less selective four-year institutions, the results suggest that Pell students are not crowded out of more selective schools by HOPE's intent to retain the best Georgia high school students, as might have been anticipated.
2006 "Labor-Market Consequences of Poor Attitude and Low Self-Esteem in Youth," Economic Inquiry. view abstract
Using longitudinal data on a cohort of high-school graduates, I show that youth who reveal poor attitude and self-esteem subsequently attain fewer years of postsecondary education relative to their high school cohort, are less likely to be employed 14 years following high school and, where working for pay, realize lower earnings. Furthermore, I find evidence that poor attitude and self-esteem in high school are significant predictors of structural outcomes, such as the degree of supervision under which individuals subsequently work, job characteristics, and on-the-job activities. These relationships suggest that real economic consequence exist in fostering positive attitude and self-esteem in youth.
2003 "Executive Rank, Pay and Project Selection," Journal of Financial Economics (with Jack Barron). view abstract
This paper extends the literature on executive compensation by developing and testing a principal-agent model in the context of project selection. The model's focus on executive project selection decisions highlights the multidimensional nature of executive choices that affect the value of the firm. An executive not only makes an effort choice that determines the quality of information on which to base a decision but also sets the decision criteria for selecting projects. A project selection framework is also shown to introduce endogenous uncertainty into compensation that can influence the executive's effort choice. Using an extensive data set, our empirical work supports the main hypotheses of the model, including the significance of executive rank in determining the extent of use of incentive pay in general and equity-based incentive pay in particular.
2000 "The Effects of High School Athletic Participation on Education and Labor Market Outcomes," The Review of Economics and Statistics (with Jack Barron and Brad Ewing). view abstract
We introduce a simple allocation-of-time model to explain the high school athletic participation choice and the implications of this choice for educational and labor market outcomes. Four different factors that could explain athletic participation are identified in the context of this model. A variety of tests of the model are provided using two data sets: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. We find some evidence that athletic participation directly affects wages and educational attainment. However, much of the effect of athletic participation on wages and educational attainment appears to reflect differences across individuals in ability or value of leisure.
I couldn't sleep one summer night so ended up writing a short comment to Harbaugh (2003), which must be read first in order to appreciate my contribution to this growing literature. My comment is available here.
some suggestions:
Still using a word processor to edit Stata code? Have a crack at one of the free text editors. Text Wrangler is a good place to start. Check out SubEthaEdit for more advanced features.
I've started my switch to Tex. TeXShop is a TeX previewer for Mac.
Apple's own hardware test only randomly tests RAM for errors. This is surely valuable to those who want to be randomly informed of errors. However, the rest of us might appreciate Memtest.
It is almost shocking that they don't charge for Stellarium.
Try Rand McNally instead of MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. It is said to be more accurate.
Have young children? See How Stuff Works.
The standard in Go software... download Goban. Also check out the Dragon Go Server.
BarFly is a nice abc editor, player and tool to typeset sheet music. John Chambers' music directory is a nice searchable directory of tunes.
The Utility Times piece on me from 2007. (The Utility Times is a student-run newsletter in the department.)
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some photos:
Wallace Monument, Stirling, Scotland.
Twelve Stones, River Esk, Scotland.
