Antony Davies

Antony Davies

  • Associate Professor of Economics, Duquesne University

Dr. Davies is currently an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University.  His areas of research include forecasting and rational expectations, consumer behavior, international economics, and mathematical economics.

Dr. Davies has lectured at numerous venues including the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the American Psychological Association, the International Conference on Panel Data, the International Forecasting Symposium, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In addition to teaching at the undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. levels, Dr. Davies was an equities analyst for The Burney Company (Falls Church, VA), Chief Analytics Officer and acting Chief Financial Officer for Parabon Computation (Fairfax, VA), and President and founder of Paragon Software (now Take-Two Interactive, NASDAQ: TTWO).

His research has appeared in the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Economic Psychology, the International Journal of Forecasting, Clinical Cancer Research, Applied Economics, the Journal of Socioeconomics, and Analysis of Panels and Limited Dependent Variable Models (published by Cambridge University Press). His popular press writings have appeared in BizEd, World & I, Religion and Liberty, and the International Journal on World Peace. Most recently, Dr. Davies presented a lecture on the current state of university tuition and the economic impact of proposed regulatory legislation at the annual meetings of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.

Dr. Davies earned his BS in Economics from Saint Vincent College, and PhD in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany.

PUBLISHED RESEARCH

Journal Article

Midnight Regulations and the Cinderella Effect

Antony Davies, Veronique de Rugy | Oct 01, 2009
Recent studies have shown preliminary evidence of a tendency for outgoing administrations to generate a flurry of last-minute regulatory activity. This so-called Cinderella effect is described as resulting from the combination of an administration being in power yet, because it is out-going, not being subject to political ramifications from its actions. In this paper, we look at monthly regulatory activity over the past 30 years and compare the baseline growth in regulations (measured using the proxy of pages in the Federal Register) to the growth immediately following a Presidential election when the sitting President is re-elected, not re-elected, and when the party in control of the White House changes. We find significant evidence supporting the existence of a Cinderella effect.

WORKING PAPERS

Do Federal Matching Funds Inhibit State Growth? image

Do Federal Matching Funds Inhibit State Growth?

Antony Davies, Rossen Valchev | Aug 2008
Employing data for the state of Texas from 1963 through 2006, this workding paper concludes that increases in FMFs lead to lower state economic growth.
Midnight Regulations: An Update image

Midnight Regulations: An Update

Antony Davies, Veronique de Rugy | Mar 2008
In 2001, former Mercatus Center scholar Jay Cochran examined the number of pages in the Federal Register, as a proxy for regulatory activity.  He found that when the occupation of the White House switches to the party formerly out of power, the volume of regulation in the outgoing administration's final quarter-year averaged 17 percent higher than the volume of rules issued during the same period in non-election years. This working paper takes a second look at the existence of the midnight regulation phenomenon by improving on Cochran's original work.
Implications of Foreign Investment Patterns for Federal, State, and Local Bond Financing image

Implications of Foreign Investment Patterns for Federal, State, and Local Bond Financing

Antony Davies | Oct 2007
While standard economic theory suggests that the untaxed yields on municipal bonds should roughly equal the after-tax yields on Treasury bonds, actual yield data show that the untaxed yields on municipal bonds are much higher. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as the municipal bond puzzle. The authors find that changes in the relationship between municipal and Treasury bond yields correspond to changes in corporate income tax rates, personal income tax rates, the liquidity of municipal bonds relative to Treasury bonds, and the supply of municipal and Treasury bonds issued by the federal and municipal governments.

TESTIMONY & COMMENTS

Public Interest Comment

Proposed Reforms to Federal Reserve Regulation Z ('Truth in Lending')

Antony Davies | Mar 28, 2005
This comment is an analysis of the Federal Reserve's proposed reforms to "Regulation Z," which implements provisions of the "Truth in Lending" Act.