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Browsing PERC Publications by Subject "Retirement_Savings"
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Item The Impact of College Diversity on Behavior Toward Minorities(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2017-10-01) Hoekstra, Mark; Carrell, Scott E.; West, James E.For decades, colleges and universities have focused on increasing racial diversity on college campuses through targeted policy efforts. Authors Hoekstra, Carrell and West investigate whether diversity causes members of the majority to change their subsequent behavior toward minorities by studying squadrons of freshmen at the United States Air Force Academy.Item The Impact of Election Fraud on Government Performance(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2019-03-07) Peralta, AbigailElection fraud is considered pervasive throughout many countries, raising concerns it can facilitate corruption and inhibit economic growth by preventing voters from holding elected officials accountable. This paper examines whether reducing election fraud causes improvements in government performance. To measure the type of government corruption and red tape that inhibits economic growth, author Abigail Peralta focuses on building permit approvals in the Philippines, since delays in granting approvals are often associated with requests for bribes. To identify effects, the author a switch to automated elections in 2010 that made committing fraud more difficult through the use of stronger ballot security measures, timely counting of ballots, and the simultaneous transmission of votes to various servers. Estimates from a research design comparing changes over time in previously high-fraud and low-fraud towns indicate that automated elections significantly reduced election fraud, as measured by digit-based tests. In addition, results indicate that this led to a sharp and sustained 15 percent increase in the number of building permits approved annually, leading to greater investment in the local economy.Item The Impact of Teacher-Student Gender Matches: Random Assignment Evidence from South Korea(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2015-11-23) Meer, Jonathan; Lim, JaegeumGender disparities in academic performance may be driven in part by the interaction of teacher and student gender, but systematic sorting of students into classrooms makes it difficult to identify causal effects. The authors use the random assignment of students to Korean middle school classrooms and show that the female students perform substantially better on standardized tests when assigned to female teachers; there is little effect on male students. The evidence shows that teacher behavior drives the increase in female students’ achievement.Item The Increase Convex Order and the Tradeoff of Size for Risk(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2014-02-01) Liu, Liqun; Meyer, JackOne random variable is larger than another in the increasing convex order if that random variable is preferred or indifferent to the other by all decision makers with increasing and convex utility functions. Decision makers in this set prefer larger random variables and are risk loving. When a decision maker whose utility function is increasing and concave is indifferent between such a pair of random variables, a tradeoff of size for risk is revealed, and this information can be used to make comparative static predictions concerning the choices of others. For random variables ranked by the increasing convex order, the choices of all those who are strongly more (or less) risk averse can be predicted. Thus, the increasing convex order, together with Ross’s (1981) definition of strongly more risk averse, can provide additional comparative static findings in a variety of decision problems. The analysis here discusses the decision to self-protect, and several others.Item The Long Run Effects of De Jure Discrimination in the Credit Market: How Redlining Increased Crime(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2019-08-20) Anders, JohnToday in the United States, the welfare costs of crime are disproportionately borne by individuals living in predominately African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods. This paper by author John Anders shows that redlining practices established in the wake of the Great De-pression make present-day contributions to this inequity. In particular, an unannounced population cutoff is used that determined which cities were redline-mapped to show that redline-mapping increased present-day city-level crime. Channels though which redline-mapping influenced crime include increasing racial segregation, decreasing educational attainment and harming housing markets.Item The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2016-08-09) Hoekstra, Mark; Carrell, Scott; Kuka, EliraThere's a great deal of research on how classmates can affect test scores and discipline in school, but what about later in life? In Working Paper 1605, the authors look at the long-term impact of childhood peers, particularly with respect to labor market outcomes in adulthood.Item The Probability Premium Approach to Comparative Risk Aversion(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2015-04-23) Liu, Liqun; Neilson, William S.In the framework of expected utility, nth-degree risk aversion/loving is unequivocally characterized by the sign of the nth-order derivative of the utility function, but there exist different notions of one decision maker being nth-degree more risk averse than another. This paper first reformulates Pratt’s (1964) probability premium approach to comparative (2nd-degree) risk aversion with a nonrandom starting wealth, and then shows that the reformulated probability premium approach can be easily extended to deal with random starting wealth and comparative nth-degree risk aversion. The paper shows that interpersonal comparisons of various versions of probability premia for nth-degree risk aversion are characterized by the (n/m)th-degree Ross more risk aversion of Liu and Meyer (2013), where n > m >1. Besides the original Pratt setting, the same comparative nth-degree risk aversion extends to probability premia derived from the risk apportionment setting of Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006) and the comparative statics setting of Jindapon and Neilson (2007).Item The Relationship Between Health Insurance and Early Retirement: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2018-08-27) Aslim, Erkmen GirayBeginning with the first round of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansions, which specifically targeted low-income adults without dependent children, the uninsured rate reached a record low in 2015. However, the spillover effects of the Medicaid expansion, such as the relationship between health insurance and labor supply, have become a point of interest for both researchers and policy makers alike. In working paper 1807, PERC postdoctoral research associate Erkmen Giray Aslim investigates whether the increased availability of Medicaid through the ACA’s expansions affects the retirement decisions of targeted workers. Among low-income childless adults, findings show that the expansions increased Medicaid enrollment for both men and women, and that enrollment resulted in women retiring early, whereas no significant change was observed for men.Item The Time Varying Effect of Monetary Policy Surprise on Stock Returns: Bursting Bubble Beating Forward Guidance(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2015-07-09) Jansen, Dennis W.; Zervou, Anastasia S.The authors study the time varying effects of monetary policy on the stock returns in order to capture changes in the effectiveness of monetary policy over time. They find that a one percentage point surprise federal funds rate increase decreases the one-day stock return by 1.33% during the period 1989 to 2000, and by 7.47% during the period 2001 to 2007, i.e., over five times more. Also, surprises of monetary policy announcements do not have significant effects on the stock returns for most of the 1990s, but have significant effects during the 2000s. The significant period coincides with higher transparency and greater efforts from the Federal Reserve to communicate with the public, especially in the grounds of future policy, i.e., forward guidance.Item Tradeoffs for Downside Risk-Averse Decision-Makers and the Self-Protection Decision(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2015-03-26) Denuit, Michel M.; Eeckhoudt, Louis; Liu, Liqun; Meyer, JackBesides risk aversion, decision makers are often assumed to be downside risk averse. In order to investigate tradeoffs that downside risk averse decision makers face, this paper proposes five stochastic orders, each corresponding to a tradeoff involving a downside risk increase. In addition to obtaining their respective CDF characterizations, these orders are also combined with Ross more risk aversion and two versions of Ross more downside risk aversion to produce comparative static theorems identifying the choices of decision makers relative to that of a reference decision maker. The paper concludes with analysis of the decision to self-protect, a decision that increases downside risk along with making other changes. This exercise not only shows that all five stochastic orders studied in this paper find corresponding tradeoffs in the self-protection model, it also demonstrates that these five tradeoffs are the only meaningful tradeoffs that the standard self-protection model creates. Therefore, the concepts and results presented here provide a systematic and complete treatment of the relationship between self-protection and risk preferences.Item Vehicle Miles (Not) Traveled: Fuel Economy Requirements, Vehicle Characteristics, and Household Driving(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2016-08-01) Hoekstra, Mark; Puller, Steven L.; West, Jeremy; Meer, JonathanSimply put, the less Americans drive, the less gas they use. More driving, more gas. The negative effects of gasoline consumption are well-documented, ranging from local effects of automobile pollution on individuals' health to the global impact of vehicle emissions on climate change. So what makes households drive less? In Working Paper 1607, PERC's Rex Grey Professor Mark Hoekstra, PERC's Professor of Free Enterprise Steven L. Puller, UC Santa Cruz's Jeremy West, and Texas A&M University's Jonathan Meer, examine the effects of drivers' behaviors on gasoline consumption.Item The Vicious Circle of Blackouts and Revenue Collection in Developing Economies: Evidence from Ghana(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2018-11-20) Dzansi|, James|Puller, Steven L.; Street, Brittany; Yebuah-Dwamena, BelindaAccess to reliable electricity is one of the largest barriers to economic growth in developing economies. Utilities suffer from the twin challenges of quasi-fiscal deficits and the need to implement rolling blackouts during periods with supply shortages. In this paper, the authors measure a negative feedback loop between bill payment and rolling blackouts that can create a “revenue trap� for electric utilities. Using household-level data on bill payment and power outages before and after a power crisis in Ghana, the authors estimate the impact of quasi-random exposure to power outages on subsequent bill payment. This paper studies a unique feature of the power grid whereby customers in close proximity are exposed to different levels of blackouts because some are served by a feeder with critical infrastructure “down the line� and others are served by feeders that do not service essential infrastructure. Findings show that households quasi-experimentally exposed to rolling blackouts accumulate larger unpaid balances relative to households on essential feeders. This is consistent with a negative feedback loop in which decreases in power reliability induce households to pay bills at lower rates and, thus, weaken the utility’s financial viability.Item What Happened to Rosie?(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2015-02-01) Carr|, Jillian Beaugez|Rettenmaier, Andrew J.Identifying the relationship between wartime work and women’s lifetime outcomes is difficult due to scant work histories from the 1940s. This study identifies “Rosie the Riveters� using data from the 1973 Current Population Survey matched to Social Security earnings records. Relative to women who did not work during or immediately after the war, Rosies had greater labor force attachment later in life, but had similar earnings. Their husbands’ earnings were also higher. The Rosies’ outcomes were less distinguishable from the women who worked during and/or after the war, though they were more likely to be married as of 1973.Item Why Do Asian Students Study Harder? Implications of a Model of Academic Competition(Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University, 2019-08-28) Gronberg, Timothy; Liu, LiqunPopularized by the OECD’s PISA rankings of a few dozen countries/regions according to the test results of their 15 year olds, Asian students’ impressive academic achievements are now well known. Each of the top five ranking PISA regions/countries in 2012 were Asian. In this paper, authors Timothy Gronberg and Liqun Liu provide a formal theoretical analysis of how various factors affect precollege students’ academic input, using Asian students’ exceptional effort on schoolwork as an example for explanation and intuition. Four channels are discussed: higher education resources, the aptitude of school peers, selective college rewards, and college admissions criterion.