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Department of Economics

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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100399
These digital collections contain theses, dissertations, faculty publications including open educational resource materials, and datasets from the Department of Economics, and Center for Research on the Colorado Economy reports.

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Browsing Department of Economics by Subject "age"

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    Impulsive consumers and optimal social security
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2007) Findley, Thomas Scott, author; Kling, Robert W., advisor
    Unfunded social security programs are primarily justified on grounds that individuals have specific behavioral tendencies that lead to inadequate saving for retirement. To date, very little has been pursued in the way of theory to analyze this justification. I design a new model of consumer behavior that is consistent with many of the salient features of evidence on impulsive consumption behavior. In my model, "impulsive consumers" optimally formulate long-term plans, but often deviate from these consumption programs upon experiencing a psychological impulse to uncontrollably consume above and beyond. In order to examine how impulsive consumers fare in an unfunded social security program, I calibrate my model to match specific empirical features of aggregate life-cycle consumption. After calibrating the model, I employ dynamic welfare measures and find: (i) a significant welfare cost to consuming impulsively; (ii) a social security program (calibrated to the current U.S. program) does not generally improve the welfare of impulsive consumers; (iii) social security almost never improves the welfare of impulsive consumers under future demographics; and, (iv) the optimal social security tax rate is drastically smaller than the current U.S. rate.
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    Women's labor supply: a cross-country study
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2007) Altarawneh, Yaseen Mamdouh, author; Fan, Chuen-Mei, advisor
    This study aims at analyzing the cross-country variations in women's participation rates (WPRs) and the gender-gap in economic activity. It covers 45 countries over 1970-2002, 15 countries from each group: low income countries (LICs), middle income countries (MICs), and high income countries (HICs). The study employs the Seemingly Unrelated Regression Model in conjunction with the Fixed Effects Model to guarantee the individuality of each country and to control for spatial autocorrelation. Several factors such as GDP growth, GDP/capita, education, fertility, urbanization, government's role, and cultural factors are used as explanatory variables.