Refereed Journal Articles

  1. Power Law in COVID-19 Cases in China

    • with Sherzod Akhundjanov and Botir Okhunjanov, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 2022, 185(2), 699-719

      • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was first identified in China in December 2019. Within a short period of time, the infectious disease has spread far and wide. This study focuses on the distribution of COVID-19 confirmed cases in China - the original epicenter of the outbreak. We show that the upper tail of COVID-19 cases in Chinese cities is well described by a power law distribution, with exponent less than one, and that a random proportionate growth model predicated by Gibrat9s law is a plausible explanation for the emergence of the observed power law behavior. This finding is significant because it implies that COVID-19 cases in China is heavy-tailed and disperse, that a few cities account for a disproportionate share of COVID-19 cases, and that the distribution has no finite mean or variance. The power-law distributedness has implications for effective planning and policy design as well as efficient use of government resources.

  2. Risk Perception and Oil and Gasoline Markets under COVID-19

    • with Sherzod Akhundjanov and Botir Okhunjanov, Journal of Economics and Business, 2021, 115, 105979

      • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) exposed individuals to a great uncertainty about its health and economic ramifications, especially in the early days and weeks of the outbreak. This study documents oil and gasoline market implications of individuals’ behavior upon such uncertainty by analyzing the co-movement between Google search queries related to COVID-19—information search that reflects one’s level of concern about the subject (risk perception)—and the performance of oil and gasoline markets. The empirical analysis based on a structural vector autoregressive model reveals a unit increase in the popularity of COVID-19-related global search queries, after controlling for COVID-19 cases, results in 0.089% and 0.112% of a cumulative decline in Dow Jones US Oil & Gas Total index and New York Harbor Conventional Gasoline Regular spot price, respectively, after one day, 0.194% and 0.226% of a cumulative decline after one week, and 0.197% and 0.230% of a cumulative decline after two weeks. Brent Crude Oil price is found to be weakly sensitive to online search activities, which can be explained by oil price pass-through into gasoline spot price.

  3. What's in a Name? The Incidence of Gasoline Excise Taxes versus Gasoline Carbon Levies

    • with Michael Noel, International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2021, 76, 102733

      • Legislators often attach specific names to individual taxes to promote their purpose, increase transparency, and ease public backlash over tax increases. While this has political benefits, does the simple act of naming and promoting a tax for a specific purpose have a more meaningful effect in the marketplace? Do consumers respond differently to tax-induced price increases depending on the name and purpose of the tax? In this article, a natural experiment is used to compare consumer responsiveness and tax incidence after the introduction of two new gasoline taxes in Alberta - 1) an increase in the generic excise tax and 2) an environmentally-minded "carbon levy". While similar in magnitude, the taxes were very different in name, purpose, and transparency. Results show that the naming and marketing of a tax can indeed matter. Responses were lower and incidence higher for the carbon levy than the less transparent excise tax. Implications are discussed.

  4. Information Search and Financial Markets under COVID-19

    • with Sherzod Akhundjanov and Botir Okhunjanov, Entropy, 2020, 22(7), 791

      • The discovery and sudden spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) exposed individuals to a great uncertainty about the potential health and economic ramifications of the virus, which triggered a surge in demand for information about COVID-19. To understand financial market implications of individuals’ behavior upon such uncertainty, we explore the relationship between Google search queries related to COVID-19—information search that reflects one’s level of concern or risk perception—and the performance of major financial indices. The empirical analysis based on the Bayesian inference of a structural vector autoregressive model shows that one unit increase in the popularity of COVID-19-related global search queries, after controlling for COVID-19 cases, results in 0.038–0.069% of a cumulative decline in global financial indices after one day and 0.054–0.150% of a cumulative decline after one week.

  5. Gibrat's Law for CO2 Emissions

    • with Sherzod Akhundjanov, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, 526 (July) 1-15

      • In this study, we analyze the statistical properties of the growth process of national CO2 emissions for over 200 countries and territories for the period 1995-2010. The results from empirical analysis establish that Gibrat's law of proportionate effect holds for CO2 emissions, indicating that national CO2 emissions grow proportionately over time. Gibrat's law is also confirmed for CO2 emission per capita, while weak evidence is found for CO2 emission per dollar of GDP.

Working Papers

  1. Can Polluting Firms Favor Regulation? A Dynamic Game Approach

      • This study develops a game-theoretic model based on Stackelberg duopoly to analyze the preferences of polluting firms and firms with relatively clean production processes towards environmental regulation. Even though the introduction of emission fees generates a negative effect on firms’ profits, we show that it can also generate a positive effect for a relatively inefficient firm in the market, given that environmental regulation mitigates its cost disadvantage. In such cases, the inefficient firm becomes a supporter of tighter environmental regulations whereas the efficient firm will oppose such regulations. We thus show that support for environmental policies can counter-intuitively originate from polluting firms.