Working Papers
Behind-the-counter, but Over-the-border? The Assessment of the Geographical Spillover Effect of Increased Access to Emergency Contraception
Washington was the first state to ease the prescription requirements making emergency contraception (EC) available behind-the-counter at pharmacies to women of any age in 1998. I hypothesize that the increased availability of EC affects fertility rates beyond the borders of the state that allows it. In contrast to the literature, I show that increased access […]
Read MoreInvestigating the Effects of Furloughing Public School Teachers on Juvenile Crime in Hawaii
By Tim Halliday What happens to crime when 180,000 DOE students and all of their teachers are given the day off? When a fiscal crisis led to 17 “Furlough Fridays” during the 2009/2010 school year, we found ourselves in a unique position to find out. While it is tempting to imagine streets being flooded with […]
Read MoreCommon correlated effects and international risk sharing
Correct assessment of consumption risk and its international diversification has important policy implications. However, existing studies of international risk sharing rely on the unrealistic assumptions that all economies are characterized by symmetric preferences and uniform transmission of global shocks. We relax these homogeneity constraints and compare our proposed approach with the conventional ones using a […]
Read MoreEstimating Demand Elasticities in Non-Stationary Panels: The Case of Hawai‘i Tourism
It is natural to turn to the richness of panel data to improve the precision of estimated tourism demand elasticities. However, the likely presence of common shocks shared across the underlying macroeconomic variables and across regions in the panel has so far been neglected in the tourism literature. We deal with the e ffects of cross-sectional […]
Read MoreThe Impact of Marriage Equality on Hawai′i’s Economy and Government: An Update After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Decisions
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the two same-sex marriage cases have substantially increased the short-term and medium-term benefits that could accrue to Hawai‘i if the Hawai‘i State Legislature enacts legislation allowing same-sex marriages to begin in Fall 2013 or early in 2014.
Read MoreForecasting with Mixed Frequency Factor Models in the Presence of Common Trends
We analyze the forecasting performance of small mixed frequency factor models when the observed variables share stochastic trends. The indicators are observed at various frequencies and are tied together by cointegration so that valuable high frequency information is passed to low frequency series through the common factors. Diff erencing the data breaks the cointegrating link among […]
Read MorePotential Benefits, Impacts, and Public Opinion of Seawater Air Conditioning in Waikiki
This report provides a summary of an investigation by the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant College Program into the viability and effectiveness of installing a seawater air conditioning district cooling system in Waikīkī. Seawater air conditioning (SWAC) harnesses the cooling properties of cold seawater to provide cool air for air conditioning purposes. In doing so, […]
Read MoreSustainable Development and the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative: An Economic Assessment
The connection between the emerging field of sustainability science and the economics of sustainable development has motivated a line of interdisciplinary research inspired by the notion of “positive sustainability.” This notion is founded on three principles or pillars: (1) adopting a complex systems approach to modeling and analysis, integrating natural resource systems, the environment, and […]
Read MoreA dynamic approach to PES pricing and finance of interlinked ecosystem services: Watershed conservation and groundwater management
A theory of payment for ecosystem services (PES) pricing consistent with dynamic efficiency and sustainable income requires optimized shadow prices. Since ecosystem services are generally interdependent, this requires joint optimization across multiple resource stocks. We develop such a theory in the context of watershed conservation and groundwater extraction.
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