Richard J. Cebula

University of Tennessee at Knoxville | UTK · Department of Economics

This paper examines and compares the determinant of geographic living-cost differentials in the United States for the years 1970 and 1975. In both cases the cost of living is affected by population density, population size, per capita income and right-to-work legislation.

Presents a model of interregional wage-rate determination. Assumptions of indeterminacy under the wage theory; Presentation of the short-run and long-run labor supply; Impact of labor mobility constraint on wage determination. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

This study investigates the impact of ending the military draft on voter turnout in the U.S. The main study period runs from 1948 through 2006. After controlling for the unemployment rate, the degree of labor force unionization, the U.S.-Iraq War, the impact of voting in presidential elections, the female labor force participation rate, the percent...

This paper examines the relationship between union corruption actions and union membership. State-level data from the Office of Labor-Management Standards, and other sources, are utilized over two study periods (1974–2000 and 2001–2008) to test three hypotheses, including the union corruption hypothesis, as possible explanations for the decline in...

This study addresses a question that has not been researched much previously, namely, does the unavailability of health insurance act as an incentive for persons to enlist in the military in the U.S.? This relationship is proffered as the “Military Health Care Magnet Hypothesis.” The present study endeavors to provide insight into this issue within...

This paper provides a template for the taxation of cigarettes that not only will yield a rich source of government revenue but also has the potential to improve public health. The tax formulae provided here expressly tax the nicotine and tar content of any brand of cigarette. This acts to discourage the substitution of higher nicotine brands for lo...

This study study has two objectives. First, it seeks to apply a hedonic pricing model to determine whether, in the spirit of Tiebout (1956), Oates (1969), and Tullock (1971), property taxes have been capitalized into the prices of single family homes located within in the Savannah Historic Landmark District in Savannah, Georgia. A total of 593 home...

Purpose To present a method for calculating the discount rate that teams apply to future-year draft picks relative to current-year draft picks and then apply that method to the actual draft picks and trades over the period 2011–2022. Design/methodology/approach The National Football League (NFL) Draft permits teams to trade the selection rights fo...

This empirical research study endeavors to elevate our understanding of the interrelationship of several aspects of economic dynamism at the state level in the United States. We investigate the factors influencing geographic mobility, i.e., both net in-migration and gross in-migration patterns, by simultaneously focusing on two hypotheses using sta...

Since the early 1980s, there have been a number of principally empirical studies of the impact of government budget deficits on interest rates that have typically tested the hypothesis that larger deficits raise interest rates. However, in more recent years, this topic has received far less attention. Accordingly, this study seeks to “update” the f...

This empirical study extends the public choice literature on the allocation of death during war by examining the political economy of foreign fighter deaths in the Russo-Ukrainian War since the 24 February 2022 invasion. The study explores the roles played by various demographic factors, military institutions, and international trade relations in d...

This study extends prior research on the relationship between surf break quality and the degree of localism exhibited by surf gangs in at least three ways. First, it adopts Surfline.com’s latest data on California’s surf breaks in order to re-examine whether or not the level of localism displayed by California’s surf gangs is a positive function of...

Purpose Bank failures are critical events that have far-reaching implications for the financial system and various stakeholders. This study aims to focus on analyzing the phenomenon of small bank failures in the USA. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts the coarsened exact matching (CEM) technique to enhance the reliability of the analysi...

We investigate the impact of federal budget deficits and other factors on the ex-post and ex-ante real yields on high-grade municipal bonds. The estimation results reveal that both yields increase with the real yield on 30-year Moody’s Aaa-rated bonds and provisions in the Community Reinvestment Act but decrease with net capital inflows, the real G...

The study discovers that mixed ownership reform aimed at enhancing the performance and resource allocation efficiency of state‐owned enterprises may have unintended consequences in China. When the nature of state‐owned control remains unchanged, there is a risk of increased overinvestment due to misaligned interests between state‐owned equity repre...

Arguably, rational consumer behavior can take the form, under a variety of circumstances (including cultural), for consumers/households that have achieved a "comfortable" standing of living/utility level, involve the minimization of work effort to achieve that utility level. In other words, constrained utility maximization is not the only rational...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of tax freedom as well as net in-migration on state-level cost-of-living differentials in the U.S. using panel data for the period 2008-2017. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses panel two-stage least squares estimation controlling for factors contributing to cost-of-living differe...

In the United States, there exist enormous geographic differentials in the cost of living. A sound, basic understanding of factors that influence such geographic living‐cost differentials is important to help formulate useful policies to address various contemporary economic and social problems such as public‐school funding across counties. In this...

We are the first to empirically analyze whether the "Guidance on Accessing Capital for Minority, Underserved, Veteran and Women-Owned Business Concerns" (Guidance) program was successful. The program was implemented to promote the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans provided by Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) in the second round compare...

This paper uses Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to account for model uncertainty and to identify the robust determinants of county-level rent levels for a panel of 111 counties and independent cities in Virginia from 2008 to 2017. Of the fifteen determinants tested, the results show that single-family home prices, per capita education spending, and...

This exploratory empirical study proffers and empirically examines the following two hypotheses: the higher the monthly rent levels being charged for apartments, the lower the percent of the population age 18 years to age 65 that opts to obtain private (whether group or individual) health insurance: and the greater the percentage growth rate of med...

This study empirically investigates the extent of non compliance with the tax code and the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. using the most current such data available. Employing the most recent data we find that 18-19% of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS, giving rise to a "tax gap" approaching $500 b...

This research investigates the impact of accountability and the efficiency of governing institutions on economic growth of the GDP per capita in a sample of Arab Spring countries (namely Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco), 8 years after the explosion of the uprisings. For this end, we use the Two-Stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis to a...

Arguably, rational consumer behavior can take the form, under a variety of circumstances (including cultural), for consumers/households that have achieved a "comfortable" standing of living/utility level, involve the minimization of work effort to achieve that utility level. In other words, constrained utility maximization is not the only rational...

This study empirically investigates the extent of non compliance with the tax code and the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. using the most current such data available. Employing the most recent data we find that 18-19% of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS, giving rise to a "tax gap" approaching $500 b...

Since Charles Tiebout first hypothesized that consumer-voters move to the venue that best satisfies their preferences for public goods and since Gordon Tullock subsequently emphasized that the migration decision would involve assessing the tax burden associated with that venue, numerous studies of the Tiebout (sometimes, the Tiebout-Tullock) hypoth...

Purpose The purpose of the current study is to identify variables that, when integrated into the random effects parametric survival model, could be used to forecast the failure rate of small banks in the USA. A bank’s income production, efficiency and costs were taken into consideration when choosing the internal components. The breakout of the fin...

We investigate whether Minority Owned/Controlled Banks (MDIs) perform better or worse than Non-Minority Banks (NMDIs) in terms of lower profit rates and higher risk. MDIs and NMDIs are compared using a propensity score matching (PSM) methodology. We also compare the performance when their headquarters are in the same census tract. In contrast to pr...

Purpose This paper to identify those states that suffered the largest job losses, largest GDP declines and the highest unemployment rates and those states whose employment levels, unemployment rates and GDP declines were smallest during the COVID-19 recession. In addition, this paper endeavors to provide at least preliminary insights into why some...

This study uses Bureau of Economic Analysis data on state-level productivity levels and growth rates over the period 1977–2019. We find that states with relatively high productivity tend to experience somewhat lower productivity growth over time, whereas states with relatively lower productivity experience somewhat higher productivity growth over t...

This study provides new insight into factors that influence the poverty rate by testing the following hypothesis: the percentage of the population in poverty is positively related to rent levels. Rent levels constitute an issue effectively overlooked in the poverty determinants literature. The present study estimates a panel data set inclusive of c...

Given the importance to businesses of having a better understanding of factors that influence migration, this study argues that there are two dimensions of the quality of life and economic opportunities that have largely been ignored in previously published studies of migration patterns in the U.S.: the impacts of (1) the costs of commuting between...

This study utilizes logistic regression to identify annual financial statement and performance ratio factors that influenced the failure rate of U.S. small banks before and after the Financial Crisis identified during December 2007 through June, 2009. The study includes rates of small bank failure before and Financial Crisis spanning the years 2001...

Using a sample of 863 offerings on the ChiNext Market in China from 2009 through 2020, this study explores the roles of the board of directors and the moderating effects played by venture capitalists on IPO underpricing. The study finds that board reputation and board members’ experiences could lower the degree of IPO underpricing. There is a U-sha...

In this exploratory study, it is observed that there is a potentially important dimension of the quality of life that has been effectively ignored in prior migration studies in the U.S.: air quality as reflected by the presence of coal dust per se. Accordingly, it is hypothesized in this study that an elevated presence of coal dust in close proximi...

Purpose The purpose of this analysis is to explain why labor shortages may have appeared during this pandemic. Interestingly, in this COVID-19 pandemic period, the labor supply shortage could very well become more easily explained than under the traditional portrayal of consumer economic behavior. The matter seemingly lends itself to provocative em...

Impact of economic freedom on the overall cost of living.

Factors underlying rapidly escalating college costs and solutions for the problem.

Factors underlying the degree of homelessness in the U.S. These include labor market freedom and the overall cost of living.

Conflict of interest and herding behavior.

Issues that occur with any tax system involve the incentives and disincentives of individuals to evade the tax. This theoretical note investigates how risk preferences could affect tax evasion under the proposed FairTax. We develop a constrained utility-maximization framework to examine how individuals with different risk preferences could respond...

Prior research uses the collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1991 as a de facto experimental framework within which to examine the impact of prospective benefits on the motivation of athletes to succeed in the Olympic Games. Prior to the collapse, successful Soviet Bloc Olympians were provided extraordinary living conditions and lifestyles. These...

Effectively no scholarly research has been published in peer-reviewed journals on the potential migration impacts of environments that are more conducive to entrepreneurship. Similarly, the potential migration impact of personal freedom also is essentially ignored in the literature. This study seeks to add to the literature by investigating the imp...

The annualized interest rate charged on payday loans can reach 1,950 percent, whereas similar rates charged by banks are typically less than 25 percent. Also, persons borrowing from payday lenders and paying the higher interest rates are disproportionately lower-income Blacks. This provides an incentive for Blacks seeking loans to turn to banks rat...

Focusing on the 311 Chinese firms listed in the global markets from 2008 to 2019, based on the trade-off theory and the resource slack theory, using panel vector autoregressive model and panel threshold model, this paper explores the impact of fulfilling ESG responsibility on firm performance. The study reveals that in the short run, fulfilling ESG...

An examination of what is happening to China's share of U.S. debt over the past two decades.

Purpose This study mathematically aims to evaluate the implications of a central bank’s adoption of a policy of quantitative easing (QE)/relative QE. Design/methodology/approach It is shown, within an investment-savings (IS)-liquidity preference-money supply (LM) framework, that this policy prerogative has, depending upon the aggressiveness which...

This study seeks to provide new insights into factors that influence homelessness in the U.S. by empirically investigating two heretofore effectively unexplored hypotheses as they relate to homelessness. The first hypothesis is that the greater the overall degree of entrepreneurial activity in a given environment, the lower the degree of homelessne...

Over the last several years, a body of the scholarly literature has emerged analysing the effects of proximity to coal mines and various human health indicators in the United States. These studies have found evidence of an increased poor health status associated with the production of coal and with close proximity to coal mines. The present study c...

Public higher education in the United States is being challenged, as never before, by numerous conditions that need to be addressed if the public college and university systems are to survive and fulfill their responsibilities to the American public. Student enrollment at these institutions has been on a significant downward trend for a full decade...

This study investigates the impact of local culture, as measured by religiosity, on corporate risk-taking, based on a sample of 155 Italian listed firms, involving 2,382 firm-year observations over the study period 2000–2016. The empirical estimation results suggest a statistically significant negative relationship between corporate risk-taking and...

We examine the impact of differences in state‐level higher education policies on location choices of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. using six years of available data over the period 2000 to 2012. The effect of greater access to higher education on the percentage of undocumented migrants residing in a state is positive, suggesting the existence...

The age-adjusted death rate from drug overdoses in the United States per 100,000 individuals rose from 6.8 in 2010 to 17.1 in 2018. The most common explanation offered is the "deaths of despair" hypothesis. We identify additional factors that have contributed to the rise in drug overdose deaths in cities and counties.

This study identifies factors that may have influenced the degree of aggregate federal personal income tax evasion in the U.S. An established tax evasion model is updated to include the most recent data available and augmented with the addition of heretofore neglected or overlooked explanatory variables. To measure the degree of aggregate tax evasi...

A large empirical literature has found positive effects from economic freedom on economic outcomes, such as output and per capita economic growth. This study seeks to explain empirically the disparate timing of state manufacturing earnings and employment decline, as well as the shift among states in both manufacturing earnings and manufacturing emp...

The National Football League (NFL) allocates new players to the League’s 32 teams using the annual NFL Draft. Teams are permitted to trade various draft picks as the Draft is underway. In the early 1990s, “The Chart” was developed as a price-guide for teams in negotiating draft-pick trades. Massey and Thaler (2013) found that NFL teams make biased...

‘Deaths of despair’ is the most commonly cited explanation for the 151% increase in drug-overdose deaths that occurred in the USA between 2010 and 2018. We use panel data describing 84 Virginia cities and counties to assess the validity of the deaths of despair hypothesis and alternate explanations that focus on disability rates, travel time to wor...

This study explores the impact of housing prices on urban land use efficiency based on data collected from 30 municipalities and provincial capitals in China over the 2007–2017 period. The empirical results show that there is a significantly negative association between the average housing price and urban land use efficiency. Furthermore, we find t...

While the research linking interest rates to government deficits is extensive, the impact of other tax-related variables is uncommon. This study seeks to add to the literature on credit markets by exploring the impact of not only the budget deficit but also average effective personal income tax rates and personal income tax evasion as explanatory v...

This study empirically investigates the “relative tax gap hypothesis,” which posits that the greater the size of the relative tax gap, the greater the degree to which the U.S. Treasury must borrow from domestic and/or other credit markets and hence the higher the ex ante real interest rate yield on the Bellwether 30 year U.S. Treasury bond. The stu...

Using the Kauffman indices of entrepreneurial activity, which effectively have been entirely overlooked in the domestic migration literature to date, this study seeks to investigate the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and domestic gross in-migration in the U.S. and whether that relationship is bi-directional. The two-part hypothesis b...

In this exploratory state‐level empirical study for the United States, the authors estimate a pooled time‐series/cross‐section framework, with control variables for population size and population growth, for the years 2015–2016. Within this context, the least squares estimates lead to the following tentative findings: (1) homelessness is positively...

The rise of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus led to the postponement, and possible cancellation, of the remainder of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) 2019–20 season. Major League Baseball's (MLB) (2020 season) and the National Football League's (NFL) (2020–21) seasons may be cancelled too. This empirical note estimates the loss of jock tax...

This empirical study adopts an open-economy loanable funds model to investigate the impact of post-Bretton Woods U.S. federal government budget deficits and personal income tax rates on the ex post real interest rate yield on thirty-year Treasury bonds. In this study, the budget deficit is measured in two different ways, the total (“unified”) budge...

This empirical study posits and tests the ‘tax-rate induced bond substitution hypothesis,’ wherein the propensity for bond buyers to substitute tax-exempt municipal bonds for taxable bonds in their portfolios is hypothesized to be an increasing function of the maximum federal personal income tax rate. This substitution acts to elevate the real inte...

Purpose Influences on the pattern of internal migration in the US, including economic factors, quality-of-life factors and public policy variables have been extensively studied by regional scientists since the early 1970s. Interestingly, a small number of studies also address the effects of economic freedom on migration. The purpose of this paper i...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of aggregate federal personal income tax evasion on the real interest rate yield on 10-year Treasury notes, 20-year Treasury bonds and 30-year US Treasury bonds. Design/methodology/approach An open-economy loanable funds model is developed, with income tax evasion expressly...

The present paper statistically examines whether it can be inferred that the greater the labor market freedom in an environment, the lower the unemployment rate in that environment, other things held the same. The hypothesis is predicated on the tenet that enhanced labor market freedom in a state leads to a more efficiently operating labor market a...

This exploratory empirical study investigates the validity of a claim by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (2014) that The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 may have acted to reduce the interest rate on high grade municipal bonds in the United States. The model also investigates the interest-rate effect of the federal budget defic...

In this study, we investigate whether debt overhang may contribute to explaining the declining growth rate of investment in China. By using firm-level data, we find a nonlinear firm debt–investment relationship and derive thresholds beyond which debt has a negative and significant impact on investment, which supports the theory of debt overhang.

In the 15 years since publication of the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game in 2003, major-league baseball (MLB) has seen the embrace of analytics by both fans and teams. Using 45 seasons of MLB data, since the introduction of the designated-hitter in the American League in 1973, the present study validates the central premise in Mon...

In the present study, we empirically investigate the uncertainty of the effectiveness of recent monetary policies in lowering the real mortgage rate in the U.S. In particular, we have an eye towards determining whether the Fed’s policies have been consistently effective or whether, instead, there is uncertainty regarding whether, when, and to what...

This study investigates the impact of various factors on the ex-ante real interest rate yield on high grade municipal bonds. The AR/2SLS estimation implies that this ex ante real interest rate is an increasing function of the ex-ante real interest rate yield on thirty-year Treasury bonds while being a decreasing function of net capital flows. The y...

This exploratory study seeks to add to the income tax evasion literature by investigating a heretofore ignored potential determinant of aggregate federal personal income tax evasion in the U.S., namely, the labour force participation rate. It is hypothesized that the higher (lower) the labour force participation rate, the lower (greater) the degree...

Using annualized data for the 1974–2015 period, this study adopts a loanable funds approach to investigate empirically the impact of U.S. federal government fiscal policy of income tax rate cuts on the ex ante real interest rate yield on high grade municipal bonds. Empirical appears to show that the ex ante real interest rate yield on high grade ta...

Purpose This study investigates the impact of federal income tax rates and budget deficits on the nominal interest rate yield on high-grade municipal tax-free bonds (municipals) in the US. The 58-year study period covers the years 1959 through 2016 and thus is very recent. Design/methodology/approach The study develops a loanable funds model tha...

The data presented in this article are related to the research article entitled “Do shareholder coalitions affect agency costs? Evidence from Italian-listed companies” Research in International Business and Finance, Forthcoming (Rossi et al., 2018) [1]. The study shows an empirical analysis using an extensive balanced panel dataset of 163 Italian l...

This study investigates the relationship between agency costs and ownership structure for a sample of listed Italian companies to determine the impact of shareholder coalitions on agency costs. Using a balanced panel dataset of 1956 firm-year observations for the period 2002–2013, the results provide evidence that ownership concentration and debt p...

This study investigates the impact of various factors on the ex-ante real interest rate yield on high grade municipal bonds. The AR/2SLS estimation implies that this ex ante real interest rate is an increasing function of the ex-ante real interest rate yield on thirty-year Treasury bonds while being a decreasing function of net capital flows. The y...