Browsing by Author "Harbaugh, William"
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Item Open Access Aligning Oregon's Higher Education with a Changing Labor Market: Job Polarization and the Evolving Role of the Community College(University of Oregon, 2021) Elliott, Hans; Harbaugh, William; Jacobsen, Trond; McDermott, GrantThis thesis first analyzes the Oregon labor market over the last decade to determine the impact of job polarization, and then analyzes changes in Oregon community college completions to observe student and program trends. Many of the occupations that community college students are prepared for are classified as “middle skill” due to the routine and manual qualities associated with their labor. Therefore, community colleges must be aware of the impact of job polarization, a theory that associates improving technology with a rising demand for high-skilled and least-skilled labor, but a relative falling demand for middle-skill labor. While there is minimal evidence of job polarization in Oregon, this thesis does find a decline in demand for middle-skill workers accompanied by an increase in demand for high-skill workers. Meanwhile, I find that community college students shifted away from programs associated with middle-skill occupations, and towards programs associated with transferring for an advanced degree. Using these results, this report intends to help community colleges determine which programs to invest further resources in so that their students are best prepared to succeed in the Oregon labor market.Item Open Access Bargaining by Children(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2002-07-20) Liday, Steven G.; Harbaugh, William; Krause, KateWe study the development of bargaining behavior in children age seven through 18, using ultimatum and dictator games. We find that bargaining behavior changes substantially with age and that most of this change appears to be related to changes in preferences for fairness, rather than bargaining ability. Younger children make and accept smaller ultimatum proposals than do older children, Even young children are quite strategic in their behavior, making much smaller dictator than ultimatum proposals. Boys claim to be more aggressive bargainers than girls do, but they are not. Older girls make larger dictator proposals than older boys, but among younger children the proposals differ much more by height than by sex. We argue that the existence of systematic differences in bargaining behavior across age and sex supports the argument that culture is a determinant of economic behavior, and suggests that people acquire this culture during childhood. We argue that the height differences indicate that forces other than culture, in the usual sense of the word, are also important. Publisher InfoItem Open Access The Carrot or the Stick: Rewards, Punishments, and Cooperation(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2002-08-20) Andreoni, James; Harbaugh, William; Vesterlund, LiseWe examine rewards and punishments in a simple proposer-responder game. The proposer first makes an offer to split a fixed-sized pie. According to the 2×2 design, the responder is or is not given a costly option of increasing or decreasing the proposer's payoff. We find substantial demands for both punishments and rewards. While rewards alone have little influence on cooperation, punishments have some. When the two are combined the effect on cooperation is dramatic, suggesting that rewards and punishments are complements in producing cooperation. Providing new insights to what motivates these demands is the surprising finding that the demands for rewards depend on the availability of punishments.Item Open Access Demonstrating worker quality through strategic absenteeism(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2002-06-14) Harbaugh, William; Nouweland, Anne van denDetermining the productivity of individual workers engaged in team production is difficult. Monitoring expenses may be high, or the observable output of the entire team may be some single product. One way to collect information about individual productivity is to observe how total output changes when the composition of the team changes. While some employers may explicitly shift workers from team to team for exactly this reason, the most common reasons for changes in team composition are at least partly voluntary: vacation time and sick days. In this paper, we develop a model of optimal absenteeism by employees which accounts for strategic interactions between employees. We assume the employer uses both observed changes in output and the strategies of the employees to form beliefs about a given worker’s type. We argue that the model we develop is applicable to a variety of workplace situations where signaling models are not, because it allows a worker’s decisions to provide information aboutItem Open Access Descriptive Analysis of the Impact of COVID-19 on Grades at the University of Oregon(University of Oregon, 2021) Walker, Natalie; Grimm, Matthew; Harbaugh, WilliamThe COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense loss and disturbance in all aspects of society. College students had to rapidly adapt to an online learning environment while dealing with personal disruptions caused by the pandemic in order to maintain their college and future career path. We hypothesize that grades have increased — despite previous literature finding decreased student outcomes in online courses — due to universities implementing more lenient grading policies. In this paper, we descriptively analyze administrative data from the University of Oregon to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on student performance and retention in Spring and Fall terms of 2020. Additionally, we examine variations of these effects across departments. Preliminary comparison of average grades in pre-COVID and post-COVID terms show an increase of 0.278 GPA points on a 4-point scale. Our purpose is to describe newly emerging trends in higher education caused by the pandemic and offer insight into the effect of administrative policy on student outcomes at the University of Oregon.Item Open Access Economic Experiments That You Can Perform At Home On Your Children(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2001-06-01) Krause, Kate; Harbaugh, WilliamThis paper describes some simple economic experiments that can be done using children as subjects. We argue that by conducting experiments on children economists can gain insight into the origins of preferences, the development of bargaining behavior and rationality, and into the origins of "irrational" behavior in adults. Most of the experiments are exploratory, and the objective is as much to learn how to conduct economic experiments on children and suggest avenues for further research as to describe specific results. Preliminary results suggest that while children are very different from adults in some ways, such as their rate of time preference, they are very similar in others, such as their bargaining and altruistic behavior. We also find that children can make choices that generally satisfy the usual transitivity test for rationality, and that in some ways they may even be more rational than adults. The paper includes protocols which can be used to replicate the experiments.Item Open Access Effects of Student Major Indecision on Career Outcomes(University of Oregon, 2022) Cartmell, Tycho; Harbaugh, William; Blonigen, Bruce; Jacobsen, TrondStudent major indecision is a well-studied problem for counselors, psychologists, and students who seek to build fruitful careers from their college education. To quantify the effects of student major indecision on career outcomes, this paper analyzes University of Oregon alumni’s academic history data matched with corresponding career history data taken from online resumes. We use multiple linear regression analysis to estimate the effects of two observable manifestations of students’ academic indecision—undeclared status and major switching—on three observable career outcomes of interest: wages, job switching frequency, and managerial attainment. The results show that undeclaredness has significant negative effects on job switching frequency and wages, while major switching has significant positive effects on job switching frequency and wages. Both undeclaredness and major switching were shown to have insignificant effects on managerial job attainment.Item Open Access An Experimental Test of Criminal Behavior Among Juveniles and Young Adults(University of Oregon, Dept of Economics, 2006-08) Visser, Michael Scott, 1976-; Harbaugh, William; Mocan, H. NaciWe report results from economic experiments that provide a direct test of the hypothesis that criminal behavior responds rationally to changes in the possible rewards and in the probability and severity of punishment. The experiments involve decisions that are best described as petty larceny, and are done using high school and college students who can anonymously take real money from each other. We find that decisions about whether and how much to steal are, in general, rational and responsive to the variations in tradeoffs, and sometimes, though not always, to the overall availability of criminal opportunities.Item Open Access Faculty Assembly Motion #4(2011-11-30) Harbaugh, WilliamItem Open Access Labor Market Effects of Light Rail Transit: A Case Study of Portland’s Orange Max Line(University of Oregon, 2023-06) Molloy, Eli; Harbaugh, William; Yang, YizhaoThis thesis explores the relationship between transit development and job creation through a case study of the Orange MAX Line in Portland, OR. Opening on September 12, 2015, this transit investment introduced light rail transit to SE Portland and Milwaukie, OR. The City of Portland, the City of Milwaukie, and Metro sought to use the new MAX line as a means of initiating job growth in the surrounding neighborhoods. The City of Portland introduce this ideology as employment-transit-oriented development (E-TOD). This thesis examines whether the local authorities were successful in achieving their goal of job creation through a difference-in-difference econometric regressions and descriptive spatial analysis. The findings of this study were insignificant and inconclusive, as no clear effect of the transit investment on employment growth was identified. There appears to be limited evidence to suggest that there was substantial job creation in the surrounding areas of the new MAX stations compared to the control area. Using these results, this study highlights the discrepancy between the identified goals and the observed outcomes. These findings provide insight into the effectiveness of an E-TOD strategy and add to the existing literature on the relationship between labor markets and transit-oriented development.Item Open Access Menstrual Cycle and Performance Feedback Alter Gender Differences in Competitive Choices(University of Oregon, Dept of Economics, 2010-10-28) Wozniak, David; Harbaugh, William; Mayr, Ulrich, 1962-Economic experiments have shown that in mixed gender groups women are more reluctant than men to choose tournaments when given the choice between piece rate and winner-take-all tournament style compensation. These gender difference experiments have all relied on a framework where subjects were not informed of their abilities relative to potential competitors. We replicate these findings with math and word tasks, and then show that feedback about relative performance moves high ability females towards more competitive compensation schemes, moves low ability men towards less competitive schemes such as piece rate and group pay, and removes the average gender difference in compensation choices. We also examine between and within-subjects differences in choices for females across the menstrual cycle. We find women’s relative reluctance to choose tournaments comes mostly from women in the low hormone phase of their menstrual cycle. Women in the high hormone phase are substantially more willing to compete than women in the low phase, though still somewhat less willing to compete than men. There are no significant differences between the choices of any of these groups after they receive relative performance feedback.Item Open Access Preferences for Effort and Their Applications(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Corbett, Colin; Harbaugh, WilliamIn this dissertation, we experimentally examine individual preferences of effort, including time and risk preferences. In Chapter 3, we find that at least in certain settings and mindsets, individuals are very patient in their time preferences for effort, choosing to distribute effort evenly over time periods. However, they do not always live up to the stated plans, suggesting dynamic inconsistency or possibly two separate decision-making systems in the mind. This relates to our model in Chapter 2: a dual-self model of allocating effort between time periods in working toward a larger goal including incomplete information between different mindsets in the same person. Chapter 4 examines the risk preferences for effort, as a measurement of the utility function of effort, and finds that in this setting, subjects are very risk-averse over effort, compared to their preferences over money: they greatly avoid the possibility of having to complete a large number of tasks. These experiments and model help provide an understanding of how individuals allocate the scarce resource of time and energy to tasks they must complete.Item Open Access Prospect Theory in Choice and Pricing Tasks(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2002-07-20) Harbaugh, William; Krause, Kate; Vesterlund, LiseThe most distinctive prediction of prospect theory is the fourfold pattern (FFP) of risk attitudes. People are said to be (1) risk-seeking over low-probability gains, (2) risk-averse over low-probability losses, (3) risk-averse over high-probability gains, and (4) risk-seeking over high-probability losses. Using simple gambles over real payoffs, we conduct a direct test of this FFP prediction. We find that when pricing gambles subjects’ risk attitudes are consistent with the FFP. However, when they choose between the gamble and its expected value, their decisions are not distinguishable from random choice and are often the exact opposite of the prediction. These results hold both between and within subjects, and are robust even when we allow the subjects to simultaneously review and change their price and choice decisions.Item Open Access Risk Attitudes of Children and Adults : Choices over Small and Large Probability Gains and Losses(2001-11-05) Harbaugh, William; Krause, Kate; Vesterlund, LiseIn this paper we examine how risk attitudes change with age. We present participants from age 5 to 64 with choices between simple gambles and the expected value of the gambles. The gambles are over both gains and losses, and vary in the probability of the non-zero payoff. Surprisingly, we find that many participants are risk seeking when faced with high-probability prospects over gains and risk averse when faced with small-probability prospects. Over losses we find the exact opposite. Children’s choices are consistent with the underweighting of low-probability events and the overweighting of high-probability ones. This tendency diminishes with age, and on average adults appear to use the objective probability when evaluating risky prospects.Item Open Access School District and Community Factors and the Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Chronic Absenteeism(University of Oregon, 2024-11) Espinoza, Juan; Harbaugh, William; McWhorter, BrianThis study uses school district level variation in COVID closures and census data to quantify the effects that virtual and hybrid instruction had on the increases in post-pandemic chronic absenteeism. We find statistically significant evidence of a positive relationship with our best model estimating that each 1% increase in the proportion of the 2020/2021 school year spent away from fully in-person instruction increased chronic absenteeism by 0.20%, after controlling for race, income, education, school expenditures, and family structure. This thesis includes collaboratively produced work.Item Open Access The Main Socioeconomic Determinants of Exclusionary Zoning in U.S. Jurisdictions(University of Oregon, 2023) Almajed, Mohamed; Harbaugh, William; ,; ,Exclusionary zoning policies impose restrictions on the development of housing with the intention or effect of excluding certain groups or classes of people. By favoring certain demographics, such policies can disproportionately affect lower income individuals and minorities by restricting their access to affordable housing. This, in turn, exacerbates income segregation and perpetuates racial discrimination, which widens the socioeconomic gap between affluent and disadvantaged communities. This paper examines the main socioeconomic determinants of exclusionary zoning in American Jurisdictions. Using a comprehensive dataset that combines socioeconomic variables with specific regulation indexes that are intended to proxy for exclusionary zoning, this research employs multiple regression analysis to examine the main predictors of regulatory restrictiveness. The findings indicate that income, race, age, and poverty levels, all play an important role in determining the regulatory restrictiveness of U.S. jurisdictions. Specifically, the results suggest that older and wealthier areas tend to implement stricter regulations to preserve property values, while poorer areas with a higher proportion of people working in manufacturing exhibit lighter regulatory controls. The results also reveal that regulatory restrictiveness decreases in areas with a higher proportion of white residents. The discussion addresses the limitations of this study and emphasizes the need for further research to better understand the complex dynamics between socioeconomic factors and exclusionary zoning.Item Open Access Trust in Children(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2002-03-22) Liday, Steven G.; Vesterlund, Lise; Harbaugh, William; Krause, KateIn this paper we study trust/reciprocity behavior in children ages eight to eighteen using an augmented version of Berg et al.â s (1995) trust game. This study is intended to inspect and reveal when certain aspects of trust behavior are formed in individuals. In addition, we examine the affect of certain characteristics in subjects that lead to higher levels of trusting behavior.Item Open Access Unexpected Utility: Experimental Tests of Five Key Questions about Preferences over Risk(University of Oregon, Dept of Economics, 2009-12) Andreoni, James; Harbaugh, WilliamExperimental work on preferences over risk has typically considered choices over a small number of discrete options, some of which involve no risk. Such experiments often demonstrate contradictions of standard expected utility theory. We reconsider this literature with a new preference elicitation device that allows a continuous choice space over only risky options. Our analysis assumes only that preferences depend on the probability p and prize x; U = u(p; x): We then allow subjects to choose p and x continuously on a linear budget constraint, r1p + r2x = m, so that all prospects with a nonzero expected value are risky. We test five of the most importantly debated questions about risk preferences: rationality, prospect theory asymmetry, the independence axiom, probability weighting, and constant relative risk aversion. Overall, we find that the expected utility model does unexpectedly well.Item Open Access Valuing Children’s Health and Life: What Does Economic Theory Say About Including Parental and Societal Willingness To Pay?(University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2001-06-01) Harbaugh, WilliamGovernments can and do adopt many policies that will improve the health and reduce the mortality risks of children. Given this, estimates of the value of improvements in children’s health and reductions in their mortality risk are needed so that governments can rationally choose which of the many possible policies to adopt. These estimates should be based on an appropriate measure of value that is based on economic theory. This paper examines what economic theory has to say about what sorts of elements should be counted in that value, and how that value should then be used in decision-making.