Economics

Proof-of-work blockchains need to be carefully designed so as to create the proper incentives for miners to faithfully maintain the network in a sustainable way. This paper describes how the economic engineering of the Conflux Network, a high throughput proof-of-work blockchain, leads to sound economic incentives that support desirable and sustainable mining behavior. In detail, this paper parameterizes the level of income, and thus network security, that Conflux can generate, and it describes how this depends on user behavior and "policy variables'' such as block and interest inflation. It also discusses how the underlying economic engineering design makes the Conflux Network resilient against double spending and selfish mining attacks.

Economic assessment in environmental science concerns the measurement or valuation of environmental impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Integrated assessment modeling is a unifying framework of environmental economics, which attempts to combine key elements of physical, ecological, and socioeconomic systems. Uncertainty characterization in integrated assessment varies by component models: uncertainties associated with mechanistic physical models are often assessed with an ensemble of simulations or Monte Carlo sampling, while uncertainties associated with impact models are evaluated by conjecture or econometric analysis. Manifold sampling is a machine learning technique that constructs a joint probability model of all relevant variables which may be concentrated on a low-dimensional geometric structure. Compared with traditional density estimation methods, manifold sampling is more efficient especially when the data is generated by a few latent variables. The manifold-constrained joint probability model helps answer policy-making questions from prediction, to response, and prevention. Manifold sampling is applied to assess risk of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In this paper, we attempt to estimate the effect of the implementation of subscription-based streaming services on the demand of the associated game consoles. We do this by applying the BLP demand estimation model proposed by Berry (1994). This results in a linear demand specification which can be identified using conventional identification methods such as instrumental variables estimation and fixed-effects models. We find that given our dataset, the two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression provides us with convincing estimates that subscription-based streaming services does have a positive effect on the demand of game consoles as proposed by the general principle of complementary goods.

We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay and average cost of a school voucher in a program that randomly allocates vouchers. We consider a nonparametric, nonseparable choice model that places no restrictions on the functional form of utilities or the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. We exploit the insight that the welfare parameters in this model can be expressed as functions of the demand for the different schools. However, while the random allocation of the voucher reveals the value of demand at two prices, the parameters generally depend on its values beyond these prices. We show how to sharply characterize what we can learn when demand is specified to be entirely nonparametric or to be parameterized in a flexible manner, both of which imply that the parameters are not necessarily point identified. We use our tools to analyze the welfare effects of voucher provision in the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school voucher program in Washington, DC. We find that the provision of both the status-quo voucher and a wide range of counterfactual vouchers of different amounts have positive benefits net of costs. In comparison, traditional logit models produce estimates towards the lower end of our bounds, and hence may understate the benefits. We also find that the positive results can be explained by the popularity of low-tuition schools in the program; removing them from the program can result in a negative net benefit.

I estimate the semi-elasticity of blood donations with respect to a monetary benefit, namely the waiver of user fees when using the National Health Service, in Portugal. Using within-county variation over time in the value of the benefitI estimate both the unconditional elasticity, which captures overall response of the market, and the conditional elasticity, which holds constant the number of blood drives. This amounts to fixing a measure of the cost of donation to the blood donor. I instrument for the number of blood drives, which is endogenous, using a variable based on the number of weekend days and the proportion of blood drives on weekends. A one euro increase in the subsidy leads 1.8% more donations per 10000 inhabitants, conditional on the number of blood drives. The unconditional effect is smaller. The benefit does not attract new donors, instead it fosters repeated donation. Furthermore, the discontinuation of the benefit lead to a predicted decrease in donations of around 18%, on average. However, I show that blood drives have the potential to effectively substitute monetary incentives in solving market imbalances.

The implementation of Goods and Services Tax(GST) is often attributed as the main cause of the rising prices of goods and services. The main objective of this study is to estimate the extent of GST implementation impact on the costs of production, which in turn have implication on households living costs.

We quantify the significance and magnitude of the effect of measurement error in satellite weather data on modeling agricultural production, agricultural productivity, and resilience outcomes. In order to provide rigor to our approach, we combine geospatial weather data from a variety of satellite sources with the geo-referenced household survey data from four sub-Saharan African countries that are part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative. Our goal is to provide systematic evidence on which weather metrics have strong predictive power over a large set of crops and countries and which metrics are only useful in highly specific settings.

Many countries are ethnically diverse. However, despite the benefits of ethnic heterogeneity, ethnic-based political inequality and discrimination are pervasive. Why is this? This study suggests that part of the variation in ethnic-based political inequality depends on the relative size of ethnic groups within each country. Using group-level data for 569 ethnic groups in 175 countries from 1946 to 2017, I find evidence of an inverted-U-shaped relationship between an ethnic group's relative size and its access to power. This single-peaked relationship is robust to many alternative specifications, and a battery of robustness checks suggests that relative size influences access to power. Through a very simple model, I propose an explanation based on an initial high level of political inequality, and on the incentives that more powerful groups have to continue limiting other groups' access to power. This explanation incorporates essential elements of several existing theories on the relationship between group size and discrimination, and suggests a new empirical prediction: the single-peaked pattern should be weaker in countries where political institutions have historically been less open. This additional prediction is supported by the data.

Individuals' behavior in economic decisions depends on such factors as ethnicity, gender, social environment, personal traits. However, the distinctive features of decision making have not been studied properly so far between indigenous populations from different ethnicities in a modern and multinational state like the Russian Federation. Addressing this issue, we conducted a series of experiments between the Russians in Moscow (the capital of Russia) and the Yakuts in Yakutsk (the capital of Russian region with the mostly non-Russian residents). We investigated the effect of socialization on participants' strategies in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, Ultimatum game, and Trust game. At the baseline stage, before socialization, the rates of cooperation, egalitarianism, and trust for the Yakuts are higher than for the Russians in groups composed of unfamiliar people. After socialization, for the Russians all these indicators increase considerably; whereas, for the Yakuts only the rate of cooperation demonstrates a rising trend. The Yakuts are characterized by relatively unchanged indicators regardless of the socialization stage. Furthermore, the Yakutsk females have higher rates of cooperation and trust than the Yakuts males before socialization. After socialization, we observed the alignment in indicators for males and females both for the Russians and for the Yakuts. Hence, we concluded that cultural differences can exist inside one country despite the equal economic, politic, and social conditions.

Technological change is responsible for major changes in the labor market. One of the offspring of technological change is the SBTC, which is for many economists the leading cause of the increasing wage inequality. However, despite that the technological change affected similarly the majority of the developed countries, nevertheless, the level of the increase of wage inequality wasn't similar. Following the predictions of the SBTC theory, the different levels of inequality could be due to varying degrees of skill inequality between economies, possibly caused by variations in the number of skilled workers available. However, recent research shows that the difference mentioned above can explain a small percentage of the difference between countries. Therefore, most of the resulting inequality could be due to the different ways in which the higher level of skills is valued in each labor market. The position advocated in this article is that technological change is largely given for all countries without much scope to reverse. Therefore, in order to illustrate the changes in the structure of wage distribution that cause wage inequality, we need to understand how technology affects labor market this http URL this sense, the pay inequality caused by technological progress is not a phenomenon we passively accept. On the contrary, recognizing that the structure and the way labor market institutions function is largely influenced by the way institutions respond to technological change, we can understand and maybe reverse this underlying wage inequality.