Kawika Pierson

A behavioural dynamic model of the relative age effect

Abstract The relationship between date of birth and success in a variety of sports, including hockey, is well established. This phenomenon is known as the relative age effect (RAE). We model the RAE in Canadian youth hockey as a positive feedback loop where an initial age advantage is reinforced through additional training and playing opportunities based on perceived skill superiority. The same causal mechanism leads to a higher quit rate for relatively younger players. Our model effectively replicates the birth month distribution of Canadian National Hockey League players (R2 = 86.79%) when driven by Canadian birth distributions. We use this model to evaluate three policies that aim to lessen the RAE. All of the policies reduce the RAE with a significant delay. The most effective policy is a combination of providing additional support to age disadvantaged children and rotating the cut-off date for youth leagues between January 1st and July 1st annually. In equilibrium, this approach leads to a 96% reduction in the RAE compared to the base case.

The Government Finance Database: A Common Resource for Quantitative Research in Public Financial Analysis

Quantitative public financial management research focused on local governments is limited by the absence of a common database for empirical analysis. While the U.S. Census Bureau distributes government finance data that some scholars have utilized, the arduous process of collecting, interpreting, and organizing the data has led its adoption to be prohibitive and inconsistent. In this article we offer a single, coherent resource that contains all of the government financial data from 1967-2012, uses easy to understand natural-language variable names, and will be extended when new data is available.

Social capital and cultural adjustment of international assignees in NGOs: do support networks really matter?

International assignees face cultural adjustment challenges in their host countries in work and nonwork situations. At the same time, social capital theory suggests that individuals can access and mobilize resources from their social networks. We explore the use of social networks by international assignees from a non-governmental organization in their cross-cultural adjustment to the host country. Specifically, we are interested in the individuals who directly provided support to the expatriate, a network that we term the ‘current assignment support network’. We focus on the size, type and frequency of contact of the international assignees support network, and investigate to what extent these variables can predict overall cultural adjustment to the host country, or separate dimensions of cultural adjustment such as interaction adjustment, general adjustment and work adjustment. Our findings indicate that certain characteristics of the international assignees current assignment support network do impact their cultural adjustment to the host country, but that the effects are moderated by whether the assignee has prior international experience.

A Replication Study of “Why Do Cities Hoard Cash?” (The Accounting Review 2009)

Gore’s article explores the determinants and implications of cash reserves. Here, we replicate Gore’s finding of a positive relationship between environmental uncertainty and municipal fund balances using the same data, the same specifications, and the same econometric software. We also test the robustness of her original findings by adding years and observations. We show that the empirical results reported in Gore’s article are largely replicable and that its results are robust to substantial data extensions. Nevertheless, we believe that Gore reaches normative conclusions that municipalities hold “excess cash reserves,” which are not justified by her empirical results.

Is a Good Normative Model of Public Spending Run Backward a Good Positive Model

We test a positive model of government spending and savings, where jurisdictions seek to stabilize spending growth and where revenue growth and savings are assumed to be continuous-time stochastic processes, the Dothan–Thompson optimal budget model. Our empirical tests address two reduced-form specifications derived from this model, each applied to two different subsets of municipalities. For each of the two specifications, we first estimated models using data for all available municipalities (more than 20,000) covered by the U.S. Census government finance data, and then tested them again on a much smaller balanced subset of the full panel. We find that municipalities do not, on average, optimally stabilize spending in the face of revenue volatility, nor do they consistently use savings to do so. There is, however, at least modest statistical evidence that savings reflect revenue volatility at typical levels of volatility. For all model specifications tested, the single greatest determinant of savings at the municipal level is the state in which the municipality is located. The next challenge is to identify and measure the impact of the underlying factors that explain the dramatic state-to-state differences observed in municipal savings patterns.

The Operational Determinants of Utility Pole Decay and Optimal Replacement in the Pacific Northwest

Wood utility poles are central to many electrical distribution networks, yet there have been no published studies to determine what operational characteristics of utility poles are indicative of decay in the field. We apply survival analysis to a database of more than 17 000 utility poles in the Pacific Northwest, and find that larger circumference poles decay sooner, that Douglas fir poles do not last as long as western red cedar poles, that a split top has a large negative impact, and that the presence of a transformer makes decay more likely. We use our estimates for the size of these effects to calculate a pole-specific optimal replacement time that minimizes the cost of the pole. Our results are regional, and may not apply generally, but we document how our approach can be adapted to any electrical distribution network.

How you buy affects what you get: Technology acquisition by state governments

Abstract Research suggests that governments should rely on standardized information technology solutions rather than custom built ones. We find that, for many categories of taxes, states that have contracted out the development of their tax-processing systems to providers offering standardized solutions see statistically and economically significant increases in collections relative to states that have not. We find no evidence that financial administration expenditures increase for these states. At the same time, there are several categories of taxes where we do not find a positive impact. We reconcile these findings by developing a qualitative argument that standardized solutions in tax administration may be most effective for the types of taxes that are the most difficult to enforce.

Taxation Without Representation? The Political Economy of State Minimum Wage Levels

Minimum wage hikes express our sympathy for the working poor and our solidarity with them. But their importance is largely symbolic. The net effects of moderate increases in wage floors are vanishingly small. Statutory wage minimums work like taxes on labor, with their proceeds paid directly to low-wage workers and their costs shifted forward to consumers. Consequently, their distributional effects on the burden side are like those of sales taxes. Variations in state minimums appear to be driven in good measure by a combination of partisan political control and opportunities for burden shifting to nonresidents.