Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mutual Aid: A Community-Led Solution To Economic Hardships At The University Of Maine, Tamra Benson

Honors College

Economic inequality and hardships are common issues on college campuses, for both students and employees. Mutual aid is the act of giving and receiving aid within a community where those who have extra resources may give to those who lack them, to build community care and resilience in the face of hardships. Many college campuses have established mutual aid funds to provide a safety net for those who are left behind by standard assistance programs. These funds can have several structures, so conducting research is essential before deciding on a model. The goal of this project was to design a …

Citizen Perceptions Of The Sustainability Of Marine Aquaculture, Bruce Wyatt

Honors College

As the world confronts the need for sustainable food systems, marine aquaculture serves as a key opportunity to produce safe, sustainable seafood. However, marine aquaculture still faces social resistance to its adoption with environmental and economic concerns leading to citizen and consumer hesitations regarding the industry and its products. In this study, we explore factors that lead to a citizen holding primarily positive or negative views of marine aquaculture with a focus on whether these views are driven by environmental or economic perceptions. Using a survey of Maine coastal residents (n=295), we find that individuals whose use of the Maine …

S8e1: How Can Maine Grow And Diversify Its Economy?, Ron Lisnet, Jake Ward

The Maine Question

Maine’s economy is evolving with several burgeoning industries, like artificial intelligence and alternative energy, and new opportunities in its quintessential natural resource sectors, such as commercial fishing and forestry. The University of Maine’s Office of Strategic Partnerships, Innovation, Resources and Engagement, or SPIRE, is supporting statewide economic growth by connecting startups and expanding companies with resources and experts at UMaine, and building strategic partnerships that grow talent, innovation and investment in the state and beyond.

In the first episode of “The Maine Question” Season 8, Jake Ward, UMaine vice president of innovation and economic development, and Renee Kelly, associate vice …

S5e10: Why Is The Supply Chain Bogged Down?, Ron Lisnet, Patti Miles

The Maine Question

Supply chain problems are occupying many people’s minds, especially with the holidays around the corner. Numerous newspaper stories and TV segments have featured images of cargo ships waiting for days or weeks to unload their goods from Asia into ports up and down the West Coast. Americans are witnessing shortages of many products they once took for granted, including lumber, various food items and computer chips, among others. Demand for goods has grown, yet producers are struggling to keep up after a slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this week’s episode of “The Maine Question,” Patti Miles, an associate …

The Blue Economy : What Is It? What Is The Importance To Maine? How Is Umaine Involved?, Umaine Marine Initiative, University Of Maine

General University of Maine Publications

Promotional flyer for a presentation about The Blue Economy: What is it, What is the importance to Maine, & How is UMaine Involved? The event, sponsored by the UMaine MARINE Initiative, a unique Maine-based initiative that brings together university, industry, government, and community collaborators who through integrated and innovative transdisciplinary marine research, education, and outreach are dedicated to the enhancement of social and economic wellbeing in Maine and beyond.

Electric, Hybrid And High Fuel Efficiency Vehicles: Cost-Effective And Equitable Ghg Emission Reductions In Maine, Jonathan Rubin, Kathryn Ballingall, Erin Brown

Transportation

Maine’s transportation sector accounts for 54% of Maine’s CO2 emissions, with almost all of this coming from gasoline and diesel (MDEP 2020). On a per-capita basis, Maine’s transportation sector is about average for the nation (rank 24 out of 50). Reducing transportation-related petroleum demand and emissions will benefit Maine’s economy. This can be achieved by increasing vehicle efficiency, switching to alternative fuels (e.g., electricity, biofuels) that have lower emissions per mile, and by reducing the demand for motorized transportation. These actions can and should be done while meeting social equity goals that account for regional, income and racial inequalities. The …

Long-Term Gene–Culture Coevolution And The Human Evolutionary Transition, Timothy M. Waring, Zachary T. Wood

School of Economics Faculty Scholarship

It has been suggested that the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). But there is disagreement about how to apply the ETI framework to our species, and whether culture is implicated as either cause or consequence. Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) is also poorly understood. Some have argued that culture steers human evolution, while others proposed that genes hold culture on a leash. We review the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans and find a set of common themes. First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance and is probably driving …

Effects Of The Transportation And Climate Initiative On The Maine Economy: An Analysis Of Cap-And-Invest And Its Heterogeneous Impacts On Rural And Urban Households, William L. Somes

Honors College

In December 2020, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was released by the Transportation and Climate Initiative Program (TCI-P), a collaboration of 13 jurisdictions in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. Modeled on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the TCI-P follows a cap-and-invest framework to reduce emissions from the transportation sector by 26% from 2022 to 2032. Since the TCI-P is expected to raise the price of gasoline by 5¢ to 9¢ per gallon, there has been concern that some populations may be disproportionately affected. The present research studies the potential heterogeneous impacts of the TCI-P …

S4e8 : What Does The Future Look Like For Manufacturing In Maine?, Ron Lisnet, John Bedling

The Maine Question

Manufacturing — making products and adding value to raw materials — plays a crucial role in Maine’s economic well-being, but the industry is changing.

Pulp and paper production has declined over the years as several mills have shuttered. Emerging firms are smaller than they once were, and many now use high-tech, precision manufacturing. Despite its alterations, however, the manufacturing economy in Maine continues to expand and evolve.

Companies eager to fuel or participate in industry growth face challenges in their efforts to create new products, implement cutting-edge technology and teach their existing workforce new skills. Fortunately, the Advanced Manufacturing Center, …

A Climate Chronology, Sharon S. Tisher

School of Economics Faculty Scholarship

The most challenging of all endeavors in human history will likely be that of understanding the impact of our industrial and technological enterprises on the planet’s climate and ecosystems, and responding effectively to the threats posed by that impact. I began writing this chronology while developing a climate policy course at the University of Maine. It has grown substantially during the ensuing nine years, and continues to grow.

By juxtaposing developments in climate science, U.S. policy, and international policy over the previous two centuries, I hope to give the reader new insights into where we have been, where we are …

Memorial Notice For Professor Emeritus, Dr. Charles Scontras, Bureau Of Labor Education. University Of Maine

Bureau of Labor Education

Dr. Scontras was a tireless advocate for workers and for the preservation Maine’s history of working class struggle. For more than half a century Dr. Scontras addressed the history and present condition of labor in Maine. His work appeared in the op-ed pages of Maine’s newspapers, in six volumes of Maine labor history covering the period from 1636 to the present, in presentations at labor halls and in his determination to make the historical records of Maine labor unions available at the University of Maine Fogler Library Labor Archives.

Covid-19_School Of Economics_Malacarne And Colleagues Address The Impacts Of Covid- 19 On Maine's Food System, University Of Maine School Of Economics

Teaching, Learning & Research Documents

Screenshot of a University of Maine School of Economics news release webpage regarding Jonathan Malacarne (SOE Assistant Professor), Jason Lilley (University of Maine Cooperative Extension Professional), and Tora Jackson (Maine Farmer Resource Network) presenting a summary of the impacts of COVID-19 on Maine's food system at the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry's (DACF) 2021 virtual Maine Ag Trades Show.

Ensuring A Post-Covid Economic Agenda Tackles Global Biodiversity Loss, Pamela Mcelwee, Esther Turnout, Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline, Jennifer Clapp, Cindy Isenhour, Tim Jackson, Eszter Kelemen, Daniel C. Miller, Graciela Rusch, Joachim H. Spangenberg, Anthony Waldron, Rupert J. Baumgartner, Brent Bleys, Michael W. Howard, Eric Mungatana, Hien Ngo, Irene Ring, Rui Santos

Teaching, Learning & Research Documents

Report that explores how governments can help mitigate ecosystem and species loss through their COVID-19 stimulus and recovery plans.

Assessing The Potential Equity Outcomes Of Maine’S Climate Action Plan: Framework, Analysis And Recommendations, Senator George J. Mitchell Center For Sustainability Solutions

General University of Maine Publications

The recommendations of these groups have now been completed and the equity assessment that you see before you contains an analysis that was carried out by the University of Maine’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions (hereafter, Mitchell Center) to assess the recommendations’ attention to equity issues.

While the impacts of Maine decreasing its greenhouse gas emissions will not be large relative to global emissions, the state’s Climate Action Plan is an important step in the right direction. Maine is not only leading by example, but is also creating policies that will reduce emissions as well as enhance …

Participation In The Belt And Road Initiative: Who Joins And Why?, Patrick Groening

Honors College

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a large-scale, global infrastructure project introduced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The primary goal is to invest in infrastructure projects across Eurasia and Africa in an effort to improve regional connectivity. This research explains who participates in the BRI through cross-country quantitative analysis and two in-depth qualitative case studies. Through a logit analysis of political economy factors such as GDP per capita, FDI inflows, aid data, and others, I find that economic need is a significant predictor of membership as well as previous involvement in Chinese organizations such as the AIIB. …

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 …

Maine Energy Overview, Mariya Pominova, Jonathan Rubin

Energy & the Environment

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 …

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, …

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 …

Valuing The Economic Benefits Of Conservation Land In Downeast Maine, Lesley Lichko, Mindy Crandall, Tora Johnson, Adam Daigneault

Forest Resources Faculty Scholarship

This report uses an ecosystem services approach to calculate the economic value of conservation lands in Downeast Maine, an area composed of Hancock and Washington Counties. This region, roughly bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Penobscot River, and Canada, includes extensive coastline, thousands of acres of forestland, areas of agricultural land, mountains, lakes, rivers, and wetlands. The area is known for its recreational and aesthetic resources, and productive offshore areas. Employment centers range from the tourism-dominated area of Bar Harbor in Hancock County, adjacent to Acadia National Park, to the Baileyville tissue mill and Woodland pulp mill area in Washington …

Inpatient Mental Health Services In Rural Hospitals Of The United States And Canada: A Case Study Of Maine And New Brunswick, Dominic Gayton

Honors College

An important resource for mental health patients is their nearest hospital, and this is especially true in rural regions where outpatient mental health services may be lacking. In the United States, policies are in place which limit the ability of small, rural hospitals to provide inpatient psychiatric services cost effectively, leading many hospitals to forgo offering the services at all. This project compares the situation in the United States with that of Canada—where similar policies are not present under a vastly different healthcare system—to see if inpatient psychiatric services are more or less prevalent in rural Canadian hospitals and whether …

The Fiscal Effects Of Public Investment In College Education, Jacob Spaulding

Honors College

This paper quantifies the fiscal impacts that increasing levels of college educational attainment has on the tax revenues received by and the expenditures of governments at all levels: federal, state, and local. College graduates prove to be more fiscally valuable citizens than non-college graduates to society. They generate more in taxable income for the government, and they rely less upon a range of public assistance programs. The average college degree generates approximately $361,115 in total federal taxes in present value, and $182,795 in total state and local taxes in present value. The average college degree results in a reduction of …

Rummaging Through The Attic Of New England, Brieanne Berry, Jennifer Bonnet, Cindy Isenhour

Anthropology Student Scholarship

The concept of the circular economy has taken off, gaining momentum along with concerns about resource depletion, waste, and the impending ‘end of cheap nature’ (Moore 2014). Environmentalists and industrialists alike have promoted the benefits of reuse as a means toward improved efficiency and reduced resource pressure. Some have called for a new ‘culture of reuse’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al. 2014). It is in this context that we explore repair, resale, and reuse as practices with deep historical precedent and contemporary continuity. Are there lessons to be learned from places that are already home to circular economies …

Exploring The Economic Resilience In The United States Through State Gdp Output, Mariya Pominova

Honors College

Economic resilience is a rising topic in the field of economics. Although there is no standard definition, most literature suggests that the concept of regional economic resilience converged to encapsulate a region’s ability to resist, recover from, and restructure itself after an economic or environmental shock. There are a multitude of methods in the literature used to measure economic resilience. All of these methods utilize either GDP, employment, or a combination of both. While both GDP and employment cycles are powerful tools for measuring the impact of a recession on an economy, they measure vastly different things and neither fully …

The Underrepresentation Of Racial And Ethnic Minorities In Legal Occupations, Maria Beaulieu

Honors College

For the purpose of this research, minorities are defined as both racial and ethnic categories that are numerically inferior than the majority racial or ethnic group. Historical social inferiority is an arguable consequence of numerical inferiority, but is not included in this research’s definition of a minority. In this research, we see how women are numerically inferior in certain legal occupations, however gender/sex is also incorporated within the broader category of racial and ethnic minorities.

Current literature utilizing census bureau data, goes into some detail about the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority lawyers. However, this research project reaches greater …

Forecasting Labor Force Participation At The Regional Level In The United States: The Case Of Maine, Maryam Kashkooli

Honors College

This project attempts to investigate the future of labor force participation in Maine using an econometric forecasting approach. Forecasting has become an increasingly popular form of statistical analysis which uses historical distributions to help estimate future distributions of econometric models. There exists extensive literature on forecasting employment, however the literature on forecasting labor force participation is relatively small. I adapt existing econometric models and make use of time series information on sociodemographic factors such as age and net migration in order to determine how Maine’s changing demographic structure is affecting its labor force and how these effects will carry on …

The Analysis Of Labor Market Efficiency: A Comparative Analysis Of Maine And The United States, Sarah M. Welch

Honors College

The purpose of this research is to analyze the change in the labor market efficiency from before to after the great recession and its effect on economic output following the recession. Concerns have been raised about the adjustment of the labor market compared to the recovery of other economic indicators. Influenced by the methods of Blanchard and Diamond (1989) and Dixon et al. (2014), the Beveridge curve and matching function are used to estimate and observe changing labor market dynamics through the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies.

This thesis finds that labor markets for both Maine and the United …

The Impact Of Active And Passive Ownership On Total Shareholder Return And Environmental, Social, And Governance Performance Of Companies, Abigail J. Bennett

Honors College

The purpose of this study was to test the impact of passive and active ownership on total shareholder return (TSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score of firms. The motivation behind the study is the rise in passive investing over the last few decades and the concern that passive owners are not able to engage sufficiently with management of the companies they are invested in.

This study hypothesized that firms that are actively controlled have high TSR and higher ESG scores than firms that are passively controlled. The hypothesis was supported by the reasoning that passive owners lack the …

Constructing Identity Through The Lens Of Fashion: An Honors Thesis, Cara P. Doiron

Honors College

Fashion is an artistic decision that every person makes every day. Even those who say they don’t care about clothing are still portraying something about themselves to the outside world with the stylistic choices they make. This creative Honors Thesis explores the impact of fashion on self-representation, accomplished through the design and construction of a capsule wardrobe line of clothing. Due to the project’s personal and introspective nature, the intended wearer is the artist, and therefore the pieces are specifically tailored to her, rather than the straight sized garments that are typically produced in the fashion industry. This line consists …

An Agent-Based Model Of Urban Sprawl: York And Cumberland Counties, Maine, Kaitlyn G. Lavallee

Honors College

Urban sprawl is defined as the movement of populations towards the fringes of urban centers, leading to the conversion of rural land to suburban consumption. This expansion in the distribution of populations has many implications for local and state policymakers, business owners and consumers. In Maine, sprawl is particularly prevalent in Cumberland County and York County, where the state’s population is the densest. The objective of this paper is to develop an agent-based model (ABM), which attempts to reflect the movement of households within these counties. These households make decisions sourced in microeconomic theory that are built into the model. …