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Economics Of Covid-19 Syllabus, Sara Gundersen

Economics Faculty Publications

This is the syllabus for the course, The Economics of COVID-19, taught in the Fall of 2020

Stock Market Correlations To Economic Indicators, Anthony K. Quandt

Honors Theses

For this project, I researched how representative the S&P 500 (a common index of choice to represent the market) is of the economic well-being of the US. I found that stock market data can be used an as indicator of the economic well-being of the U.S.. The results do not indicate that the stock market leads to recovery, but it does suggest that it is correlated with recovery. In my analysis, I compared the S&P 500 performance to four different economic indicators: Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), The Consumer Price Index (CPI), Average Weekly Private Wages, and Unemployment Rate. A …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 22, No. 4, King Banaian, Richard Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

The St. Cloud area economy remains in recession as the uneven effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to plague the local labor market. While some local sectors are experiencing uninterrupted strong growth, the virus’ impact on the leisure/hospitality and other services sectors is creating historic existential challenges for some area firms. Overall local employment was 3.4 percent lower in October 2020 than it was one year earlier, but this is a clear improvement from what was seen in the June St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report (at which time an 11.5 percent year-over-year decline in area employment was reported). The …

Writing Tips For Economics Research Papers, Plamen Nikolov

Economics Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

State Of Northwest Arkansas Region, Business Analysis 2020, Mervin Jebaraj, Mike Harvey, Karen Roberts

State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report

Mervin Jebaraj, the center's director, will outline the economic highlights in the State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report and will report economic data and insights about the impact of COVID-19.

The State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report is viewed as one of the best measures of the area's economy, comparing that to peer regions such as Madison, Wis.; Raleigh, N.C.; Provo-Orem, Utah; Des Moines, Iowa; and Austin, Texas.

Northwest Arkansas Council Chief Operating Officer, Mike Harvey, will give an overview of the Council's efforts to attract talent to the region by highlighting quality of life and …

The Political Economy Of Nuclear Energy: Why There Is Not Broad Public Support For Nuclear Policy & Why There Should Be, Willa Grace Mei Lee

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this paper, I examine how the nuclear incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima impacted public support for nuclear energy in the United States. Particularly, I look at the ways the media has influenced public perception, and thus, nuclear policy. I also consider the economic arguments for and against using nuclear power and highlight the effects of decommissioning nuclear fleets as was seen in the aftermath of the major nuclear incidents. Lastly, I discuss how the public can become better informed on nuclear energy.

Ultimately, the three major nuclear incidents spurred anti-nuclear sentiment, which shut down nuclear plants, …

Whose Community? Market Economics And The Concept Of Solidarity, Paul R. Koch

Faculty Scholarship – Economics

The debate over the relationship between market processes and community values has intensified in recent years, due to the pace of economic change, as well as the respective impacts of the global financial crisis and the pandemic. This essay explores various conceptions of community, raising the question of whether or not a genuine sense of social solidarity requires that those who participate in those interactions live in physical proximity to one another. The implications of this discussion for economic policy are also examined, including the possibility that the composition of what has been historically regarded as “conservative” economics might be …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 22, No. 3, King Banaian, Richard Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

While some sectors of the local economy continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, many area firms are now beginning to recuperate from this spring’s shockwaves. Overall local employment was 3.1 percent lower in July 2020 than it was one year earlier, but this is a clear improvement from what was seen in last quarter’s St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report (at which time we reported an 11.5 percent year-over-year decline in area employment). In addition, published job losses in the Twin Cities (and across the state) are considerably worse than what is seen locally. For example, Twin Cities …

Hoop Dreams: An Empirical Analysis Of The Gender Wage Gap In Professional Basketball, Hailey Dicicco

Business and Economics Summer Fellows

The gender wage gap is a very prominent point of discussion in the professional world, but in the sports world, it has taken the spotlight in recent years. One sport that has seen discussion and debate over salary differences is the National Basketball Association and Women’s National Basketball Association. In 2018, the average salary in the NBA was 6.4 million dollars, while the average salary in the WNBA was 71,635 dollars. A reason why these salaries are so differently is due to the amount of revenue that each league brings in. The NBA brings in roughly 7.4 billion dollars a …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 22, No. 2, King Banaian, Richard Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

Events associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have driven the local economy into recession. As has been seen throughout the U.S. (and the world), the temporary closing of many area businesses has caused an economic shock that has torn through the entire economy. Nearly all data measures have turned south as the human toll of the coronavirus has extended beyond deaths and hospitalizations to unemployment, business closures, and uncertainty that spans virtually all sectors of the regional economy. St. Cloud area employment contracted 11.5 percent in April 2020 compared to one year earlier. All sectors of the local economy shed jobs, …

Evaluating College Access Programs: The Emerging Leaders Program Impact On College Enrollment For Hispanic And Immigrant Youth, Juan Zamarripa

Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development—Student Research

The Emerging Leaders Program is a series of workshops targeted at Hispanic and immigrant first-generation students geared towards improving the likelihood they enroll in college. The present study uses different regression techniques and matching algorithms that incorporate propensity scores to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated of the Emerging Leaders Program. This study used participants from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009 to create a synthetic control group, Emerging Leaders Program student applications for data on participants, and the National Student Clearinghouse for college enrollment data. The findings indicate that the Emerging Leaders Program increased the probability …

Principles Of Macroeconomics, Ernesto Garcia Iii

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Shocks To Aggregate Demand And Aggregate Supply In The Midst Of Covid-19, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

COVID-19 sent shockwaves throughout the economy, changing the amounts of goods and services distributed and altering the demand. This article discusses the negative demand shock and adverse supply shock that the U.S. economy faced in 2020, and the policies that the government implemented to reverse these effects.

Incentivized Learning And Libraries: A Comparative Study Of Summer Reading Programs In Connecticut, Andrew Morrison

Honors Scholar Theses

With digital forms of entertainment and media more inescapable than ever, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage children and teens to read. Simultaneously, despite an overwhelming amount of literature demonstrating the educational benefits of reading, especially as a necessity in the summer between academic years, library budgets are shrinking as federal funding nears its end. How do libraries promote summer reading amidst declining interest and decreased funding? Using data from public libraries across Connecticut, this paper investigates how libraries are adapting their children's summer reading programs to a changing landscape, how programs are designed to incentivize reading without eliminating …

The Economic Contribution Of Logging And Trucking In Maine, Megan R. Bailey, Mindy S. Crandall, Anil Raj Kizha, Sheldon Green

Economic Development

Maine's forest products industry has long been hailed as a backbone of the state's economy. Multiple reports have been commissioned detailing the economic role of the sector (e.g. Bailey, 2019; Anderson III and Crandall, 2016; Gabe, 2013). It was recently estimated that the forest products industry contributed $7.7 billion in output to the state's economy in 2016 (Bailey, 2019)

An essential component of the industry is logging—which directly effects the availability and cost of delivered wood. In 2014, researchers set out to specifically highlight the logging industry's economic role in Maine (Crandall, McCullock, Nick, Kizha, 2016). The work presented here …

Artificial Intelligence & Personal Finance: Legal And Ethical Implications, Aaron Klein

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presents a lecture titled "Artificial Intelligence and Personal Finance: Legal and Ethical Implications" by Brookings fellow in economic studies, Aaron Klein. The rise of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence herald great promise in making our financial system safer, fairer, and more inclusive. However, the legacy of the use of credit as a tool to enforce and promote discrimination means these same tools can recreate and reinforce biases in ways that challenge basic ethics and the law. This lecture explores how data is used to make financial decisions, …

The Economic Contribution Of Snowmobiling In Maine, Ian Hathaway, Jessica Leahy, Mindy S. Crandall

Forest Resources Student Scholarship

Snowmobiling has been a popular winter pastime in Maine for decades. During the 2018-2019 snowmobiling season, nearly 60,000 snowmobiles were registered in Maine by resident snowmobilers, and over 25,000 snowmobiles were registered by non-residents. Since the 1998 report An Economic Evaluation of Snowmobiling in Maine, overall registrations have increased, and registrations among non-residents have more than doubled.

There has been no comprehensive evaluation of snowmobiling in Maine since the 1998 report completed by the University of Maine in collaboration with the Maine Snowmobile Association and State of Maine Snowmobile Program. In order to update the information on snowmobiling related expenditures, …

Kentucky Annual Economic Report 2020, Michael W. Clark, William H. Hoyt, Simon Sheather, Michael T. Childress

Kentucky Annual Economic Report

This report is one of the important ways that the Center for Business and Economic Research fulfills its mission to examine various aspects of the Kentucky economy. The analysis and data presented here cover a variety of topics that range from an economic forecast for Kentucky in 2020 to a broad presentation of factors affecting the economy.

Principles Of Microeconomics, Ernesto Garcia Iii

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Maine Energy Overview, Mariya Pominova, Jonathan Rubin

Economic Development

The state of Maine is a regional leader in renewable energy production and highly ranked nationally in proportion of renewable energy consumed. Maine is 3^rd in the nation for highest percentage of renewable energy consumption as a share of state total (Maine State Energy Profile 2019). However, 61% of all primary energy consumed in Maine in 2017 was from non-renewable sources, about half of which were petroleum products. Because Maine does not have oil and natural gas reserves, it is reliant on oil and natural gas imports. This causes Maine to be subject to the volatility of national and …

Integrative And Contextual Learning In College Algebra: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Economics, Choon Shan Lai, Glenn Henshaw, Tao Chen, Soloman Kone

Publications and Research

Many students consider mathematics too abstract and useless for their academic and career goals. Meanwhile, instructors in quantitative disciplines such as economics find many students mathematically underprepared for their courses. The disconnect between students’ perceptions of the utility of mathematics and their life and career may have contributed to some of the under-performance in learning mathematics. Addressing this problem requires collaboration across disciplines to develop an understanding of each other’s needs, more specifically to develop an integrative platform that allows students to apply mathematical skills in interdisciplinary contexts (Ganter & Barker, 2004). We collaboratively designed and implemented an integrative platform …

A Taxing Feminism, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. The first academic piece bringing a feminist perspective to bear on tax law dates to the early 1970s, when Grace Blumberg published “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers.” Contemporaneously, none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg (along with her tax lawyer husband Marty Ginsburg) brought a feminist perspective to bear on tax law when she argued Moritz v. Commissioner before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as depicted in the movie On the Basis of Sex. Since then, numerous other contributions have been …

Social Agglomeration Forces And The City, Peter A. Luff

Library Map Prize

The presence of “agglomeration forces” in production markets is widely accepted and has been recently quantified in the economics literature. Social scientists have done little theoretical work, however, and even less quantitative work, on how the logic of agglomeration might also apply to social groups and the gains that people derive from their social interactions. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by modeling and measuring the benefits in terms of social prestige that arose from the spatial concentration of socialites in Manhattan in the 1920s. I formulate a model of location-based social status determination that illustrates why these benefits …

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report, Quarter 4, 2020, Pittsburg State University. Gladys A. Kelce College Of Business

Pittsburg Micropolitan Reports

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report is created by the Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) at Pittsburg State University.

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report, Quarter 2, 2020, Pittsburg State University. Gladys A. Kelce College Of Business

Pittsburg Micropolitan Reports

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report is created by the Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) at Pittsburg State University.

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report, Quarter 3, 2020, Pittsburg State University. Gladys A. Kelce College Of Business

Pittsburg Micropolitan Reports

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Report is created by the Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) at Pittsburg State University.

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Profile, 2020, Pittsburg State University. Gladys A. Kelce College Of Business

Pittsburg Micropolitan Reports

The Pittsburg Micropolitan Area Economic Profile is created by the Business and Economic Research Center (BERC) at Pittsburg State University.

State Of The Northwest Arkansas Region 2020 Report, Mervin Jebaraj, David Sorto

State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report

The State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report is an annual publication, commissioned by the Northwest Arkansas Council, that serves as a tool for evaluating economic performance. In July 2018, the Northwest Arkansas Council created a new blueprint for development that outlines the peer regions and a strategic action agenda for 2018-2021. In this plan, the performance of Northwest Arkansas is benchmarked with other contemporary, high-performing regions, namely Austin, Des Moines, Madison, Durham-Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Provo-Orem. The 2020 State of the Region Report compares Northwest Arkansas (Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers MSA) with these geographies in the areas of gross domestic product, employment, …

Framing The Chicago School Of Antitrust Analysis, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Fiona Scott Morton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Chicago School of antitrust has benefited from a great deal of law office history, written by admiring advocates rather than more dispassionate observers. This essay attempts a more neutral stance, looking at the ideology, political impulses, and economics that produced the Chicago School of antitrust policy and that account for its durability.

The origins of the Chicago School lie in a strong commitment to libertarianism and nonintervention. Economic models of perfect competition best suited these goals. The early strength of the Chicago School of antitrust was that it provided simple, convincing answers to everything that was wrong with antitrust …

Hedonic Games And Monte Carlo Simulation, Sheida Etemadidavan, Andrew J. Collins

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Hedonic games have applications in economics and multi-agent systems where the grouping preferences of an individual is important. Hedonic games look at coalition formation, amongst the players, where players have a preference relation over all the coalition. Hedonic games are also known as coalition formation games, and they are a form of a cooperative game with a non-transferrable utility game. Some examples of hedonic games are stable marriage, stable roommate, and hospital/residence problem. The study of hedonic games is driven by understanding what coalition structures will be stable, i.e., given a coalition structure, no players have an incentive to deviate …