Thesis advisor: Richard McGowan / This thesis will try to determine whether any state could benefit from the introduction of casino gambling, and if so, how much extra funds could be expected. Massachusetts residents spend an estimated $620 million at Connecticut's two casinos -- Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, and they are dropping an additional $726 million at out-of-state gambling facilities each year. If this sum were to be spent in-state, Massachusetts would be able to reap a significant percentage of that amount for its state revenues. The same can be said for Rhode Island. West Warwick, Rhode Island is merely 45 minutes away from Foxwoods, and Mohegan Sun is about an hour away, and for a state with a huge deficit, the profit that RI could reap from an instate casino could make the introduction of casinos a worthwhile venture. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Operations and Strategic Management. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Was Florida a true member of the Old South and its rebel offspring or just a peripheral entity? This study looks at this seemingly simple question to probe the economic ties between Florida and her sister states of the lower South from 1850 to 1865. Clearly Florida was part and parcel of the Cotton Kingdom. The state had a reputation by 1860 as an agricultural power boasting large harvests in a lush tropical climate. This image was heralded in newspapers and journals across the lower South. The realities of poor transportation and inclement weather failed to make an impression on what quickly became the myth of Florida's riches. Residents clung to the idea of a fecund Florida ready to supply any needs, which buoyed confidence in the viability of their section as a separate nation. / Florida, the third state to secede, played a significant role in the short economic life of the Confederacy. The war years are considered at length and are the main focus of the dissertation. The conflict made state bays and inlets safe havens for blockade runners and a conduit for imported goods and exported staples like cotton. Florida was also a vital component in Confederate logistical planning and influenced the operations of rebel forces in other states. Salt and cattle, the peninsula's major contributions, augmented the rebel supply larder despite failures to live up to overly optimistic expectations based on pre-war perceptions. Union forces, aware of the material aid going to the rebels, waged a type of economic warfare in an effort to cut off the flow of supplies. As an economic member of the Confederacy Florida earned recognition as an important region, and one which can not be dismissed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-10, Section: A, page: 3706. / Major Professor: John Hebron Moore. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This dissertation investigates the effects of market forces and government regulation on the innovation decision of firms. Using Florida data on the adoption of high technology equipment in hospitals I analyzed the effects of market share, concentration, ownership including teaching status, cost and revenue, background demand such as population and income of the relevant market. / In addition, the effects of regulatory changes such as Prospective Payment System (PPS) and Certificate of Need (CON) deregulation were investigated using dynamic Weibull regression model. The Model shows the impact of explanatory variables on the likelihood of innovation and changes in the marginal probability of adoption flowing through time. / The result of estimation shows that leading firms in more competitive markets adopt earlier than others. Teaching status of a hospital, which offers technological advantage, encourages it to innovate earlier than others. The behavioral change of regulating agency rather than official deregulation appeared to affect innovation decision of firms. It is hoped that this study will better clarify the relative importance of the key variables as well as the usefulness of dynamic econometric modelling approaches so that policy makers may obtain clearer intuition about how hospitals approach major adoptions, and what factors to consider in shaping innovation policies. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-03, Section: A, page: 1013. / Major Professor: Gary M. Fournier. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This paper reexamines data on major industrial countries to investigate the dynamic interaction between money supply shocks and the real exchange rate. Specifically, this paper shows the relationship of observed comovements between money supply, industrial production index, interest rates, prices and real exchange rates to existing theories of real exchange rate determination. Using Vector Autoregression modeling technique alternative Granger causal orderings are fitted to the data in order to test validity of the different exchange rate models. The results of this study support the theory that the effect of money supply shocks is transitory and not permanent so there is no gain or loss in a country's competitiveness. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-04, Section: A, page: 1458. / Major Professor: Joan G. Haworth. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines the effects of external economic conditions, particularly inflation, on state and local government taxing and expenditures decisions. Existing literature on state and local fiscal decisions focuses on the demographic and institutional characteristics of each governing jurisdiction as the primary determinants of tax structures and expenditure levels. There has also been some study of the effects of fluctuations in federal spending and the business cycle. Inflation is not incorporated explicitly in these studies I develop a model in which tax and expenditure decisions are based on a political objective function that minimizes costs of tax rate charges and costs of expenditure levels deviating from a hypothetical level determined without regard to tax change costs, subject to a budget constraint. Two types of taxes are modeled: those levied on an ad valorem basis, and those levied on a per unit basis. In the absence of tax rate changes, revenues from the ad valorem taxes keep up with inflation, while the purchasing power of per unit tax revenues dwindles due to inflation. Because decision-makers seek to limit costs from tax rate changes, they do not adjust per unit tax rates enough to prevent erosion of real per unit revenues. Consequently, real government expenditure levels are lowered by inflation and the revenue structure is altered toward heavier reliance on ad valorem revenue sources The theoretical implications of this model are expanded by simulations showing the extent of these effects under different hypothetical rates of inflation and federal aid growth, and under varying assumptions about the relative weights of these political costs The model is tested with econometric analysis of data aggregated by states for U.S. state and local governments from 1962 to 1982. The data are found to be consistent with the empirical implications of the model. Finally, local fiscal decision-making is analyzed in more detail through a case study of New Orleans' fiscal history during the period 1978-1988 / acase@tulane.edu

Two important issues in open economy macroeconomics are explored in four separate essays. The first essay is an empirical examination of the importance of money in the determination of economic activity in the United States. This is followed by a suite of three essays that develop and apply a methodology for measuring the extent of international capital mobility using non-differential, time series, saving and investment data of eight OECD countries Essay 1. Recent literature has concluded that money no longer plays a fundamental role in the determination of real and nominal economic activity in the U.S., especially when data from the late 1980s are included in the analysis. This paper reexamines the issue using data sets ranging back to the Civil War. Cointegration tests show that an equilibrium relationship holds between real money and real income in all data samples of thirty-five years or longer. While cointegration may not hold for some of the short samples, failure is equally likely in the pre-war and inter-war periods as in the recent past. Furthermore, when normal lags between money supply changes and resultant changes in income are taken into account, cointegration frequently obtains in samples of twenty years or less. Vector Autoregressions with annual data reveal that money is the most important variable in explaining real output for both the full (post-1875) sample period as well as for the post-1952 sub-sample. Quarterly analysis supports these results for all but the 1952-1982 sub-sample, a period during which the Fed was targeting interest rates. Finally, using monthly data, by adjusting the VAR specification to capture recent structural changes in the U.S. economy, it is shown that money still Granger-causes economic activity in the post 1982 data set Essay 2. A benchmark definition of capital mobility is established. It is argued that the Feldstein-Horioka (1980) estimation strategy provides information about capital mobility that is not available via tests of interest rate parity. A literature review then illustrates that main empirical pitfalls identified by other researchers Essay 3. Evidence is provided that log-levels of U.S. saving and investment are I(1) and cointegrated over the 1947:1-1995:2 sample period. However, a sub-sample analysis reveals an I(0)-sub-sample-I(1)-full-sample inconsistency in the unit root tests. As a check, Zivot and Andrews' (1992) trend break ADF procedure is employed. Both series are shown to test I(1) even when a trend break is incorporated into the alternative hypothesis. Phillips and Hansen (1990) Fully Modified OLS yields a saving-investment coefficient of approximately 0.8, which is significantly different from both zero and one. Parameter stability tests verify that the saving-investment relationship is stable throughout the post-war sample Essay 4. Time series properties of saving and investment are explored and time series estimates of saving-investment correlations are obtained for eight OECD countries. All regressions are checked for cointegration and for parameter stability. Results are broadly supportive of Feldstein and Horioka's original contention that long-term capital is highly immobile, but reject the hypothesis of complete immobility / acase@tulane.edu

Chapter one studies the effects of nominal and real uncertainty on output growth. Uncertainty is modeled as the conditional variance of the GARCH model, and the effects of uncertainty are captured by the GARCH-M model. There are strong empirical evidences indicating that inflation uncertainty lowers output growth. There are weak evidence supporting the argument that higher output growth is associated with more risk. The empirical evidences presented indicate that the cost of inflation arises mainly from its uncertainty rather than from its level Chapters two and three study the asymmetric effect and the size effects of monetary shocks, respectively. It is shown in chapter 2 that negative shocks tend to significantly decrease output growth while positive shocks do not. However, this asymmetric effects are less robust when GARCH effects are modeled. The main arguments for asymmetric effects could be found in the goods market and the credit market. The goods market argument says that price is downward rigid but upward flexible, which causes supply curve to be convex and effects of shocks to be asymmetric. Credit constraints theory argues that positive shocks are similar to pushing a string and have no effect, while negative shocks decrease output growth like pulling a string Output is modeled as a quadratic function of monetary shocks in chapter three. The empirical results support this function form and indicate that small positive shocks have larger effects than big positive shocks and big negative shocks have larger effects than small negative shocks. In other words, the effects of monetary shocks are related to their size, and the size effects of positive shocks and the size effects of negative shocks are in the opposite direction. Two transmission mechanisms of monetary shocks are proposed to explain the size effects of shocks. The sticky price and sticky wage theory is able to explain the size effects of positive shocks. The liquidity constraint theory is able to explain the size effects of both positive and negative shocks. Both explanations show that imperfections and frictions in the market are important to transmit monetary shocks to the real economy / acase@tulane.edu

This study investigates the behavior of the small business entrepreneurs in the underdeveloped Black Sea region of Turkey in regard to their adoption of the mobile telephone and the consequences of the implementation of the mobile telephone in their social system. The study employs a trans-theoretical framework to analyze the behavioral change in five stages. The results of a cross sectional survey of 324 entrepreneurs in four provinces show that the mobile telephone had diffused very rapidly in small business with 95 percent of the study group adopting a mobile telephone as of 2005. The motives of the small business entrepreneurs for adoption were primarily business related and the mobile telephone is still considered as a business tool among the entrepreneurs. The mobile telephone is only slightly associated with the creative destruction of traditional business behavior in relation to access to finance, raw material, labor and technology changes in production methods. On the other hand, the mobile telephone is related to behavioral change towards continual learning, an interesting finding which has to be tested in other settings. Finally, the mobile telephone adoption is strongly associated with the PC and Internet adoption; however, more than 36 percent of the study group had adopted the PC before the mobile telephone, therefore the study concluded that the mobile telephone did not act as a gateway to the PC and the Internet / acase@tulane.edu

The firms of developing countries can obtain the foreign advanced technologies through licensing as well as assimilate the knowledge spilled from advanced firms of developed countries. Through the analysis of these two potential avenues of development, my dissertation explores whether and how the firms of developing countries can benefit from international technology transfer Addressing the imitation threat and double-sided moral hazard that damage the quality of licensed technology, chapter I reveals that the capability of royalty to motivate the licensor's effort affects the pricing terms of licensing contracts, the incentive of licensee to choose imitation, the efforts input to the transfer, and the quality of licensed technology. The chapter shows that the developing countries should target the licensors which can provide highly effective work and then protect the intellectual property of these licensors for improving the performance of licensed technology Chapter II studies the interactions between the international strategies and R&D investments of firms from developing countries and developed countries. Shown in this chapter, the firms of developing countries may produce in the developed countries only if the technological spillover in the developed countries is significant enough to overcome the disadvantages of the low exporting costs and the expensive production materials in developed countries. The potential significant spillover discourages the foreign direct investments (FDI) from the developed countries, although such spillover is necessary for the developing countries to benefit from the incoming FDI Chapter III studies the source, diffusion, and absorption of the spilled knowledge. A theoretical model with a nonlinear spillover is developed to explain the varied results about spillover effect found in empirical research. The chapter demonstrates how the R&D investments of developing countries are affected by the factors determining the technological spillover, which are the environment for information diffusion, the physical distance between firms, the absorptive capacity of firms of developing countries, and the gap between the technology endowment of firms of developing countries and the sophistication of the technologies employed by the multinational enterprises (MNE). The chapter shows that the developing countries should be cautious when implementing beneficial FDI policies to attract MNE for spillover / acase@tulane.edu