(click on the Title for Paper)
Katie Hoelzer
Obesity and the Marriage Market: How Increased Male Incarceration Rates Affect Female Weight Gain
A causal relationship between black male incarceration rates and black female obesity is possible through mechanisms of the marriage market. I argue that as the black male incarceration rate increases, the marriage market tightens, and black females gain incentive to lose weight. The opposite relationship may also be true: a more one-sided marriage market may reduce the gains from weight loss, in turn decreasing the incentive for women to control their weight. For single low-educated black females (perhaps those most inclined to marry crime-oriented males), empirical evidence shows that an increase in the black male incarceration rate significantly reduces the prevalence of their obesity.
Marc Klein
The Shift to Performance Shares: A new attempt at getting the incentives right
In 2005, the Financial Accounting Standards Board dramatically changed the accounting rules for expensing stock options. Afterwards, firms changed their compensation schemes, and many began offering new incentives to their executives. In fact, in 2007, CEOs in the Fortune 500 were granted $7.7 million on average in long term incentives, 25% of which came in the form of performance shares. I gather data from 2004-2007 on Fortune 500 firms and estimate a logit model to determine which types of firms were more likely to use performance shares after the rule change. The results indicate that the probability of granting performance shares is significantly higher for larger firms, for firms that are more financially developed, and for firms with fewer growth opportunities. Such findings are consistent with the proposed hypothesis that performance shares are better suited to environments where strategic planning is more precise.
Lauren Matsunaga
Expensive Eggs: A Study of Pricing and Purchasing in the Egg Donor Market
This paper offers insight to systematic egg donor pricing by agencies and selection by prospective parents using data from the Nation Wide Egg Donation agency website. The amount of in-vitro fertilization procedures performed in the United States annually, using donor eggs, increases by at least twenty percent each year. Using tobit analysis and controlling for factors like education, race and appearance, I find that post-graduate education, being Jewish and being a proven donor most significantly increase a donor’s compensation over the average compensation in her state. Through the use of logit analysis, I did not find systematic evidence for egg purchasing, except that Mormons, possibly due to their generally healthy lifestyles, and health professionals are more likely to be picked.
Nyda Mukhtar
The Welfare and Inequality Effects of Wheat Price Increase in Pakistan: Simulations Using Household Data
It is generally postulated that a substantial price increase of agricultural goods would lead to a decrease in welfare for the consumers of these goods and an increase in welfare of the farmers who produce them. Hence, for an agricultural economy, an increase in price of agricultural commodity is expected to lead to a reduction in welfare of urban households, but there may be an increase in welfare of rural households. Using data of over 15,000 Pakistani households, both rural and urban, and a Stone-Geary utility function, this paper shows that in Pakistan, which experienced an average of 71% increase in wheat prices during the year 2007-08, both the rural and urban households had a negative welfare impact of this price increase. However, the impact on welfare of rural households was less than that on urban households. Moreover, the paper also demonstrates that education, especially of the spouse of the head of the household, enhances consumption efficiency and therefore helps in making appropriate adjustments to reduce the negative effect of price increase.
Abel Samet
The Tale of Two Booms: Do Housing Prices Explain Excessive U.S. Consumption?
This paper investigates the relationship between house prices and consumption in the United States over the past three decades. It analyzes three hypotheses about the nature of that relationship: wealth effect, liquidity constraint, and financial norms. Evidence from a panel of state-level sales data supports the wealth effect and the financial norms hypotheses. The results are somewhat unclear about the liquidity constraint effect. The paper addresses the run-up in house prices beginning in the mid-1990s and examines the effect that this may have had on consumption.