EVALUATING ALTERNATIVE METHODS OF DEALING WITH MISSING OBSERVATIONS - AN ECONOMIC APPLICATION

This paper compares methods to remedy missing value problems in survey data. The commonly used methods to deal with this issue are to delete observations that have missing values (case-deletion), replace missing values with sample mean (mean imputation), and substitute a fitted value from auxiliary regression (regression imputation). These methods are easy to implement but have potentially serious drawbacks such as bias and inefficiency. In addition, these methods treat imputed values as known so that they ignore the uncertainty due to 'missingness', which can result in underestimating the standard errors. An alternative method is Multiple Imputation (MI). In this paper, Expectation Maximization (EM) and Data Augmentation (DA) are used to create multiple complete datasets, each with different imputed values due to random draws. EM is essentially maximum-likelihood estimation, utilizing the interdependency between missing values and model parameters. DA estimates the distribution of missing values given the observed data and the model parameters through Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). These multiple datasets are subsequently combined into a single imputation, incorporating the uncertainty due to the missingness. Results from the Monte Carlo experiment using pseudo data show that MI is superior to other methods for the problem posed here.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Household Production in an Egalitarian Society

Norwegian national policies strongly incentivize double-earner households and gender equality, but various gender gaps persist both at work and at home. In these seemingly contradictory situations, what are the mechanisms under which Norwegian households allocate their market and domestic labor? Drawing on both a large set of administrative data and a representative survey, this question is examined from two perspectives. First, we focus on the micro-economic processes and investigate if Norwegian households act according to economic rationality or if they still follow the gender norm “A man should earn more than his wife.” Second, we focus on how Norway’s contextual factors may influence the household experiences when a wife has better market productivity. We find that a wife with better market productivity, who is thereby facing the risk of outearning her husband, works more hours and earns more than her husband, while doing less chores—behavior consistent with economic rationality. Further analyses show that women’s “higher” relative market productivity is mainly a consequence of having low-income husbands, and “higher” and “lower” market productivity women are surprisingly similar in other sociodemographic aspects. Norwegian redistribution policies, through progressive taxation and benefit transfers, seem to mitigate the income differences and promote gender neutrality in a sense that if couples wish to pursue an untraditional division, by preference or by necessity, they seem to be able to do so without being held back by the traditional gender expectations or being very poor.publishedVersio

Local Food Consumers: How Motivations and Perceptions Translate to Buying Behavior

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Understanding the Connections Between Consumer Motivations and Buying Behavior: The Case of the Local Food System Movement

Local and organic food systems represent some of the many food sector innovations of the past decade that signal that consumers are increasingly diverse and have heterogeneous preferences that reflect their unique values and preferences (Thilmany, Bond and Bond, 2008). Yet, regardless of the significant attention and growth surrounding sustainable foods, there is still a demand for research investigating the intersection of economic and psychological factors that can aid in predicting and explaining consumer behavior. This paper uses an attitude-behavior framework, the Theory of Planned Behavior, to explore the predictive ability of psychological concepts of willingness to pay for different attributes associated with sustainable foods. Consumer attitudes toward organic, fair trade and local labeled food as well as their level of "effectiveness" are measured in an effort to understand behavioral intentions. This study uses approximately 1000 responses from a 2008 nationwide survey of consumers to investigate the role of public benefits assigned to sustainable food products manifesting in a potential increase in willingness to pay.sustainable food, willingness to pay, theory of planned behavior, perceived consumer effectiveness, Agribusiness, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

September 2008 Economic development report, no. 9

September 2008.Includes bibliographical references

Sustainability, perceived quality and country of origin of farmed salmon: Impact on consumer choices in the USA, France and Japan

publishedVersio

Location, location, location: do production sources influence consumer perceptions?

October 2009

Effect of gender composition of committees

Does having more women on a committee matter? Interestingly, answers to this question are unknown, despite a significant push toward greater gender diversity on committees and boards. This article uncovers the mechanism of if and how committees’ gender diversity impacts its deliberations and decisions. We utilize a unique dataset that matches detailed meeting transcripts of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) spanning over 30 years, with member characteristics and economy-wide conditions, allowing us to effectively compare committees with the same member resources and economy-wide conditions but different gender diversity. We find that deliberations are more thorough and engaged in more gender-balanced committees, wherein both men and women talk more about wider topics in depth. Unlike findings from other studies, women in the FOMC participate as active members, whereby they are more likely to voice formal disagreement and less likely to be dismissed by an interruption. Finally, we find that member resources and the economy-wide conditions explain the committee’s decision, where gender diversity exhibits no explanatory power by and in itself. With the high correlation between gender diversity and member resources, we demonstrate that gender composition affects committees via two channels; deliberation qualities and member resources.publishedVersio

Who are the locavores and where do they shop? An analysis of fresh produce market choices in the United States

June 2009

What Are the Economic Welfare Effects of Local Food Marketing? Exploring Impacts with the Case of Colorado Apples

This paper explores the welfare changes as a result of changes in prices and quantities of Colorado labeled apples relative to domestically produced apples, using equilibrium displacement model with two-regions: Colorado State and the rest of the United States. The results showed that in the short run producers would lose $300, while in the long run producers would increase supply to capture$263,000 in increased surplus.local food marketing, marketing channel, market segmentation, equilibrium displacement model, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Industrial Organization, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Marketing,