In developing countries, remittances play a key role as a source of external finance. Remittances are a form of aid that migrant workers send back to their families, located in their home countries, in order to support the needs of the household. In about 25% of developing countries, remittances are larger than public and private capital flows combined (International Monetary Fund, 2009). In 2008, the Philippines economy was the 47th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $322 billion dollars (Asian Development Bank, Fact Sheet). Remittances accounted for over 10% of the Philippine economy, making the Philippines one of the world’s highest remittance receiving countries. Using a probit model and an OLS regression model focusing on the Philippines in 2003, this paper will focus on exploring what variables influence the decision to send a household member away for work, what factors contribute to whether or not a household receives a remittance and if they do, how these same characteristics affect the value of the remittance.

92 students from a Southern California liberal arts college and two Beijing universities participated in an online questionnaire. Their cultural tendencies (i.e. level of collectivism and perception of family support) and responses to hypothetical investment scenarios were observed. Participants were asked to provide the amount they would invest in each scenario as well as a risk safety rating. The Chinese respondents reported higher cushion and collectivism scores than the Americans. Furthermore, the Chinese sample offered more money for the three riskiest scenarios; they also rated three scenarios safer than the Americans did. The cushion and collectivism scores were not found to predict risk appraisal and amount invested in the scenarios. The results suggest that cultural biases may have an impact on the financial risk-taking behavior of different peoples, but other cultural variables and situational determinants may play an equally influential role in affecting risk perception and investment behavior.

As corporate sponsorship of sporting events becomes a more popular marketing tool, the price tag associated with these sponsorship agreements has steepened considerably. Over the past thirty years, sponsorship has become an integral part of the Olympic Games. In this paper, we employ an event study methodology to assess the impact of both the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games and the performance of Canadian Olympic athletes on the shareholder value of national Olympic sponsors. We hypothesize, in line with current behavioral finance research, that the national Olympic sponsors will capitalize on the positive mood and attention associated with the Games in such a way that Olympic sponsorship will positively impact shareholder value. However, we find that, from a stock return perspective, corporate sponsorship of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games is not a value-adding investment. We find that while the market index is positively impacted by both the Olympic Games and Canadian medalists, there is a negative and significant impact of the Olympic Games on national sponsors. Furthermore, Canadian medalists have a positive impact on the stock returns of three individual sponsors, but these winners' effects are negative for two sponsors and insignificant for another two sponsors.

I combine theory, experiments and econometrics to undertake the task of disentangling the subtleties and implications of the distinction between risk, uncertainty and ambiguity. One general conclusion is that the elements of this methodological trilogy are not equally advanced. For example, new experimental tools must be developed to adequately test the predictions of theory. My dissertation is an example of this dynamic between theoretical and applied economics.

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine if professional investors areindicating tendencies of irrational behavior when exposed to certainpsychological dilemmas related to the financial world.</p>

Voluntary environmental labeling or certification programs provide information about the environmental characteristics of one or more aspects of a product’s life cycle to consumers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy were among the first governmental agencies in the world to adopt environmental information programs. This study examines two U.S. programs – Energy Star, an energy efficiency labeling program, and Green Power Partnership (GPP), a green energy purchasing program, and estimates how much consumers are willing to pay for refrigerators that have been awarded these labels and what factors motivate that willingness to pay. The data were obtained from a survey conducted in March and April of 2009 via an online research panel, which was constructed to be representative of the U.S. population. Analysis of the data was conducted using conditional logit regression models with fixed parameters and mixed logit regression models with random parameters. Results revealed that consumers, on average, have a willingness to pay ranging from $237.81 to $350.54 for the Energy Star label and a willingness to pay ranging from $48.52 to $70.95 for the GPP label. The results also indicate that consumer demographics and attitudes influence WTP. In particular, individuals with greater levels of stated concern for the environment or individuals exhibiting strong perceptions on the effectiveness of consumers to affect product design and the ambient environment had a greater likelihood of choosing a labeled alternative, and thus, a greater WTP for both the Energy Star and GPP label. To manufacturers and government regulators, these results suggest that energy labels can play a significant role in a consumer’s decision making process when selecting a new appliance.

This paper investigates the influence of two representative other-regarding preferences on specified issues. The first chapter studies the preferred tax rate and labor supplies of voters in the presence of income inequality aversion in a two-stage redistribution game. The two-stage redistribution game consists of a first stage in which voters vote for a flat tax rate on income with the revenues redistributed evenly and a second stage in which workers, who are also voters, provide the labor supplies with the tax rate given. I specify inequality aversion preferences into two ways: The payoff inequality aversion represents people's preference to divide their material payoff evenly, and the income inequality aversion represents people's preference to divide their income evenly without considering their efforts to earn that income. In conclusion, payoff inequality-averse workers provide the same labor supplied as a worker who does not have any inequality aversions (a standard worker) but prefers a higher tax rate to a standard worker. The income inequality-averse workers, first, provide their labor supply considering their positions in a skill distribution and, therefore, adjust their labor supply such that the income curve becomes flatter. High-skilled workers tend to earn less income, while low-skilled workers tend to earn more income. Second, the income share of the richest decreases with the degree of inequality aversion up to a point. Third, inequality-averse workers do not necessarily prefer a higher tax rate to a standard worker, mainly because some level of income inequality is already self-adjusted in the second stage. The second chapter looks at how reciprocal preferences influence coalition size in international environmental agreements. Reciprocal preferences represent how a decision maker gains an additional positive utility when it responds to a kind action with a kind action or to an unkind action with an unkind action. I incorporate reciprocal preferences in a two-stage game that predicts the decision of each government to participate in an agreement that decreases pollutant emissions. The main result shows that bigger coalition forms than the standard preference does not include reciprocal preferences. Reciprocal governments that participate in the treaty (signatories) suffer from unkindness based on pollution by non-signatories so that the threat to retaliate by polluting becomes credible. Then, free-rider governments (non-signatories) on the margin surrender to the implicit threat and participate in the treaty. Furthermore, including reciprocity reverses the usual result that there is an inverse relationship between the marginal benefit and coalition size. In other words, the size of coalition increases with the marginal benefit of abatement in an equilibrium when the reciprocal sensitivity is sufficiently high. Signatories are more likely to retaliate against non-signatories because the benefit to non-signatories of refraining from decreasing emissions aggravates the unkindness to signatories.

With the rise of technology and finance, crowdfunding has been uprising as a popular method of financing projects. Kickstarter provides an online platform in which anyone with Internet access can upload their own project “pitch” to gain funding for their idea on an all-or-nothing model. My thesis explores financial trends and factors that potentially contribute to a successful Kickstarter campaign within the classical music projects subcategory. I use a logistic regression and the Ordinary Least Squares model to examine a dataset of already successfully funded projects and a second dataset that contains both successfully and unsuccessfully funded projects that were tracked over a period of time. Additionally, I collected text files of the word content on all projects to identify most frequently utilized words for the successful and unsuccessful files. Controlling for other characteristics, the key findings are that projects with higher target funding levels are both less likely to fund and fund at a lower percentage of the target, projects receiving more comments are more likely to fund, and projects proposed by those that fund other projects are more likely to fund. In addition, certain words are correlated with success or failure. However, since the method of identifying important words used data mining rather than just testing, we cannot predict that these words would increase the likelihood of success in future projects. Due to limited sample size and high correlations among the variables in specifications including both the project characteristics and words, the main results for each set of explanatory variables used separately tend to become statistically insignificant. Additionally, the funding pattern over time appears not to exhibit the herding behavior found in some asset pricing markets. This is an interesting finding given the highly social nature of funding via Kickstarter.

People value their privacy; however, they typically do not make the protection of their privacy a priority. Privacy is oftentimes not tangible, complicating the efforts of technology users to express and act according to their privacy needs. Additionally, people may not be fully aware of the risks they are subjecting themselves to once they use the Internet for financial transactions, or create profiles on online social networks. Companies post privacy policies inform people about their informational practices; but, this information is extremely difficult to use and typically not considered in users’ decision-making processes. Privacy concerns have also had an impact on users’ adoption of new technologies that share personal information. A plethora of mobile location-finding technologies applications have become available over the last two decades, but the products and services offered by the technology developers may not comprehensively address the privacy implications and privacy concerns surrounding their use. The design considerations for these products may not provide the necessarily amount of control or risk mitigation for users to ensure that their location information is not misused. In this thesis, I focus on the impact of salient privacy information on privacy concerns and behavior in two contexts: online shopping and the use of a mobile-location sharing technology. I examine several case studies focusing on the evolution of privacy attitudes after people use specific technologies. Based on the examination of the use of a location-sharing system, I highlight several design considerations for mobile-location application developers to ensure they address their users privacy concerns. I use the results of online surveys and user studies to provide concrete information on the impact of feedback on the comfort with using location-sharing technology. This research shows that users will pay a premium to purchase from websites that offer better privacy policies IF that privacy information is made visible and understandable. This research points to the importance of control in the management of privacy concerns. Whether it be mandated by legislation, or recommended in industry standards or design standards, offering users control in the form of understandable privacy policy information, or control over the disclosure of personal information by technology, is essential.

The purpose of this study is to observe whether the religiosity of a region has an effect on its economic performance by running regressions on real gross domestic product, real household income, population, unemployment, and religiosity of each state un the U.S. from 2006 to 2012 to see if religion has a statistically significant impact in the economy do this. Considering the dwindling presence of religion in the world’s top economic powerhouses, it is expected to have a negative relationship between religion and the economy. The results show that there is a statistically significant correlation between religiosity and the economy, but the specific nature of the relationship remain inconclusive on the explicit nature of how religion may impact the economy.