Economics Programme
John Levendis
Loyola University New Orleans | Loyola · Economics Programme
Additional affiliations
August 2005 - present
New Orleans, United States
Professor (Associate)
The Relationship Between Happiness, Volunteering, and Donating
Leonid Krasnozhon
This paper uses an ordinal logit model estimated using data from four waves of the General Social Survey to examine the robustness of the purported relationship between happiness and the prosocial giving of time or money. Results from our study imply that the standard economic variables are more important than giving or donating; income is positive...
Weekend Racer: Cheating and Self-Governance in Road Racing
Historic risk and implied volatility
Mehmet F. Dicle
This study extends the volatility prediction literature with (1) new intraday realized volatility measures and (2) various implied volatility indexes for commodities, currencies, and equities. Predicting volatility is important for academics, investors, and regulators. Applications range from forecasting stock and option returns to constructing ear...
This paper studies how reputation enforces socially cooperative behavior in road racing in the New Orleans metro area. We find that reputation mechanisms have a much stronger effect for frequent road racers than for members of the New Orleans Track Club. We find that club membership cuts cheating in half while a runner who has finished at least one...
Hedging Market Volatility with Gold
The 2008 financial crisis refocused investors' attention to several safe-haven assets, most notably gold and US Treasuries. We compare the role of these two assets as potential hedge instruments for thirteen major indexes' returns and their volatilities. Our study extends the literature by using gold returns purged from the effects of being denomin...
IPO activity and market volatility
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to hypothesize two channels in which market volatility affects initial public offering (IPO) activity. Design/methodology/approach First, CEOs time the market for IPOs and volatility makes this decision process harder. Second, risk-averse IPO investors become more reluctant toward IPOs during periods of highe...
Calculating a Portfolio's Beta
We present an active-learning computer exercise where students pick stocks for a portfolio. Using their selection of stocks, two different portfolios are created: 1) a portfolio that never rebalances and 2) a portfolio that continuously rebalances. They then calculate the rates of return and betas for their individual stocks and for their portfolio...
Comprehensive Indoor Smoking Bans and Smoking Prevalence: Evidence from the BRFSS
Thomas Carlton
Michael Darden
Iben Sullivan
In an effort to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke, many governments have enacted smoke-free laws in public spaces. To the extent that smoke-free laws change perceptions, norms, and attitudes about tobacco use, these laws may also reduce the prevalence and intensity of cigarette consumption. Using nationally representative data on over four millio...
The Neighborhood Impact of Airbnb on New Orleans
The Economic Impact of Airbnb on New Orleans
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Mixing Sunnis and Shias: A Bayesian Errors-in-Variables Approach
How damaging is the Sunni/Shia split to the economies of Islamic countries? Is it better to be one or the other? Or is it better to have an even balance between the two? Answering these questions is complicated by the fact that the data are often missing or imprecisely measured. We employ the technique of Bayesian data augmentation to circumvent th...
IQ and Economic Development: A Critique of Lynn and Vanhanen
Jennifer Moreale
We re-examine Lynn and Vanhanen's argument that gross domestic product (GDP) depends upon IQ. We argue that their analysis suffers from three types of biases, each of which would tend to erroneously favor their hypothesis. Despite this stacked deck, we find that their results are rather fragile. Rather, education has a stronger impact on GDP than d...
Smoke-free laws and smoking prevalence in the United States, 1998-2010
Thomas W. Carton
Sang Hyup Lee
Background: Previous research indicates that comprehensive smoke-free policies those restricting smoking in all public places have a stronger effect on smoking prevalence than partial policies those exempting certain venues. However, previous research invariably treats smoking policies as exogenous, even though such policies exist endogenous to pre...
Using RFID Technology to Track Attendance
Tracking attendance can be tedious and takes up valuable class time. New technology is now available to allow instructors, at their own initiative, to largely automate this task. The authors have developed a set of software tools, which work with easily purchased and affordable RFID tags and scanners, to create an automated attendance management sy...
Comment on Johnson and Soenen (2004): The US stock market and the international value of the US dollar
Is there a relationship between the performance of US equity markets and the value of the US dollar? The question is of practical and regulatory significance. Previous attempts to answer the question relied upon on the lagged-causality approach of Clive Granger and his coauthors. Given that financial markets are efficient, most of the correlation w...
Mises and prediction markets: Can markets forecast?
Ludwig von Mises's methodological position is unique because it combines apriorism with qualitative empirical approach. Nonetheless, Mises's adherents and detractors continue to characterize his apriorism as rejecting forecasting. This paper argues that a prediction market is a traditional market for forward-looking information; it leverages subjec...
Estimating Geweke's (1982) Measure of Instantaneous Feedback
In this article, we describe the gwke82 command, which implements a measure of instantaneous feedback for two time series following Geweke (1982, Journal of the American Statistical Association 77: 304–313).
Importing U.S. Exchange Rate Data from the Federal Reserve and Standardizing Country Names across Datasets
fxrates is a command to import historical U.S. exchange rate data from the Federal Reserve and to calculate the daily change of the exchange rates. Because many cross-country datasets use different spellings and conventions for country names, we also introduce a second command, countrynames, to convert country names to a common naming standard.
Standardizing Country Names Across Datasets
Betul Dicle
Many cross-country datasets use different spellings and conventions for country names. For example, one dataset's 'United States of America,' may be another's 'United States,' or 'US.' This note describes a command - stdcountry - which converts country names to a common naming standard.
On the endogeneity of telecommunications and economic growth: Evidence from Asia
The impact of mobile and fixed telephones on economic growth has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in the literature on economic development. It is even of interest to theoretical macroeconomists, as it provides a useful test of the positive network externalities that should be present if endogenous growth theory is correct. We study the rela...
Telecommunications and Economic Growth
Luis H. Gutiérrez
Importing US Exchange Rate Data from the Federal Reserve
Importing Financial Data
In this article, we describe two commands—fetchyahooquotes and fetchyahookeystats—that import historical financial data and key current financial statistics from Yahoo! Finance.
A Test of Hedging Alternatives for the US Currency and the US Stock Market
Ron Christner
This paper examines the degree of correlation, and possible causation, between the US Dollar (against the Euro and the British Pound) vs. the US equity market indexes (the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ composite). The information utilized in this study is the 13 year period beginning in January 1999 and ending in June 2011. Daily returns are calculated, c...
Is Gold a Safety Asset?
Jiad M. Alqotob
The current financial crisis has refocused investors' attention to several safe-haven assets. Most notable among these are gold and US Treasuries. We compare the role of these two asset classes as safe havens from fluctuations in the indexes of the worlds' largest exchanges. The lag structure of the relationship between the safe-haven assets and th...
In this article, we describe two commands - fetchyahooquotes and fetchyahookeystats - that import historical financial data and key current finan- cial statistics from Yahoo! Finance.
The Impact of Technological Improvements on Developing Markets: The Johannesburg Stock Exchange
This study evaluates whether a significant technological improvement can have an economically justifiable contribution to market development. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) incorporated the SETS trading system from the London Stock Exchange in 2002. The efficiency and international integration of the JSE is evaluated before and after the SET...
Estimating Geweke's (1982) Measure of Instantaneous Feedback
This note describes the gwke82 program, which implements instantaneous feedback measure for two time series following Geweke (1982).
What Is The Most Popular Movie Of All Time?: Teaching The Importance Of Ceteris Paribus
Craig Santicola
Students often have difficulty understanding the importance of distinguishing between real and nominal prices, or more generally, why ceteris paribus conditions are important. We exploit students interests in popularity to teach the nominal/real distinction, and the importance of adjusting for inflation, population, and income levels. We illustrate...
HOW EFFICIENT WERE THE NEW ORLEANS SLAVE AUCTIONS?: A STRUCTURAL ECONOMETRIC APPROACH
The disparity in the prices of slaves in the antebellum south could have come from two sources, disparity in the observed characteristics of the slaves, or disparity in the unobserved valuations of the slave buyers. I use standard hedonic regression techniques to rid the Fogel and Engerman (1974) dataset of the effects of slave heterogeneity. Then,...
QUALITIES AND EFFECTIVE-QUANTITIES OF SLAVES IN NEW ORLEANS
A hedonic price index and a quality-adjusted quantity index are constructed in order to provide a clearer picture of how slave quality evolved. Controlling for slave quality, slave prices did not rise as much as previously thought. This is due to an increase in slave quality, especially during the earlier 1800s. Properly accounting for the effect o...
Day-of-the-Week Effect Revisited: International Evidence
The aim of this study is to determine whether the DOW effect still exists, and to evaluate empirically the explanations of the DOW effect for international equity markets. Evaluating 51 markets in 33 countries for the period between January, 2000 and December, 2007, reveals that the DOW effect persists for a significant proportion of equity markets...
The DL-Trading game
The DL-Trading Game is a new, open-source, instructional trading game developed to teach and assess finance at the introductory undergraduate through MBA levels. Teaching portfolio management and employing market models such as CAPM, students cannot have a practical understanding of the concepts unless they try to put together a portfolio with a ta...
Flood Hazards and Urban Housing Markets: The Effects of Katrina on New Orleans
Russell Mckenzie
This study examines the impacts on consumers' willingness to pay for certain characteristics of housing in greater New Orleans before and after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina. Single-family home sales from January 2004 to August 2006 are collected and used in a hedonic price function to estimate the changes in the value of amenities, and structu...
Greek market efficiency and its international integration
Political, economic and legal risks are among the causes of market inefficiency and the consequent under-development of financial markets. To further the understanding of the factors affecting market development, this study evaluates the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). The Greek market provides a unique opportunity to isolate market efficiency as a fa...
Telecommunications and Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa
We examine the effect on economic growth of mobile cellular phones in sub-Saharan Africa where a marked asymmetry is present between land-line penetration and mobile telecommunications expansion. This study extends previous ones along two important dimensions. First, we allow for the potential endogeneity between economic growth and telecommunicati...
Corporate corruption and chaos: A formal recursive model
G. Waters
This paper develops a formal model of organizational corruption in order to explore rigorously the dynamic implications of corporate culture. This formalism is especially important whenever feedback (i.e. recursive) mechanisms are at play, since this can induce complex dynamics which are not at first obvious. We show that the conclusions of even a...
The Legalization of Drugs – By Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe
What recantation? The wages fund doctrines of J.S. Mill in light of Smith, and Ricardo
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the various forms of the classical wages fund, and especially the claim that J.S. Mill reversed his position on the nature of the wages fund. Design/methodology/approach Textual research from original publications of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and J.S. Mill, as well as references to current interp...
Globalization and the Concept of Subsistence Wages
Walter E. Block
Jerry Dauterive
According to Malthus, there is an "Iron Law" for wages: they cannot stay above subsistence levels. When they do, increased population soon enough pushes them down to the previous level of immiseration. One might think that modern economics has long ago confined such views to the dustbin of history, however, belief in the "Iron Law" has made a comeb...
According to Malthus, there is an "Iron Law" for wages: they cannot stay above subsistence levels. When they do, increased population soon enough pushes them down to the previous level of immiseration. One might think that modern economics has long ago confined such views to the dustbin of history, however, belief in the "Iron Law" has made a comeb...
The Fallacy of Wage Cuts and Keynes's Involuntary Unemployment
"the analysis I shall like to try to outline is not merely my own; it due to a young English economist, Mr. R. F. Kahn. I should like to put his point very shortly." -John Maynard Keynes (1931, p. 368) "In this book even more perhaps than writing my Treatise on Money, I have depended on the constant advice and constructive criticism of Mr. R. F. Ka...
Book Review: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Joseph Morrel
Nuclear power has never been free from the stifling involvement of government. Heavy regulation has reduced the ability of entrepreneurs to develop and provide new means for the generation of energy using nuclear fuel. The strict parameters dictated by government officials are based upon outdated technology, an improper regulatory philosophy, and p...
Creation of a Separate Telecom Regulatory Agency: A Duration Analysis of its Time Pattern
At the center of the issues set out in the 1997 WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunication Services was the creation of separate telecom regulatory agencies. Using the Cox proportional hazards model, this study examines how a country's socioeconomic factors affect the country's incentive to reorganize its regulatory structure and create a separate te...
The Relationship between Economic Freedom and Homicide
Edward Peter Stringham
Does economic freedom lead to more or less conflict? Numerous authors argue that markets create conflict, whereas many advocates of economic freedom from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman argued the opposite. This topic has not yet been investigated empirically. This article examines the various ideas regarding why economic freedom may reduce conflict...
Avner Greif
Scott Savage
Pablo T. Spiller
Alois Stutzer
University of Basel
Marco Pagano
University of Naples Federico II
Christian Pieter Hoffmann
Erik Bohlin
Syed Basher
Qatar Central Bank
Marie-Laure Breuillé
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Eric Fruits
Archived project
Study of human behavior from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics.
Public Choice
A study of non-market decision-making.
Walter E. Block's Lab
Department of Master of Business Administration
College of Business, Department of Finance
Department of Management & Economics