Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Analytical Methods For Energy And Climate Policy, Dwayne Breger

Sustainability Education Resources

Course Description

The course will introduce students to analytical methods applicable to the evaluation of energy and climate problems and policy solutions. The methods include ethical analysis, spreadsheet analysis, lifecycle analysis, optimization and systems analysis. While applicable across many fields, the methods will be applied through class and assignments to current issues in clean energy and climate policy.

Learning Objectives

The course will provide students with the understanding and skills to analytically address issues of policy pertaining to clean energy and climate policy. Students will understand the theory and practice associated with conducting economic cost benefit analysis, optimization under constraints …

Wildlife Habitat Management, Paige Warren

Sustainability Education Resources

The primary goal for this course is to help you put into practice tools you have been acquiring in your other Natural Resources Conservation courses. We will explore wildlife-habitat relationships in depth, through the lenses of basic field zoology and natural history, evolutionary biology, and ecological theory. We will introduce you to quantitative tools used to explain ecological processes and their influence on wildlife and their environment. We will examine the dynamics and management of various habitats in New England, North America, and elsewhere through field visits and use of primary literature. But most importantly, we will ask you to …

Fake News, Real Money: Ad Tech Platforms, Profit-Driven Hoaxes, And The Business Of Journalism, Joshua A. Braun, Jessica L. Eklund

Journalism Faculty Publication Series

Following the viral spread of hoax political news in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, it's been reported that at least some of the individuals publishing these stories made substantial sums of money—tens of thousands of US dollars—from their efforts. Whether or not such hoax stories are ultimately revealed to have had a persuasive impact on the electorate, they raise important normative questions about the underlying media infrastructures and industries—ad tech firms, programmatic advertising exchanges, etc.—that apparently created a lucrative incentive structure for "fake news" publishers. Legitimate ad-supported news organizations rely on the same infrastructure and industries for …

Developing A Vendor Scorecard As A Tool To Re-Allocate Acquisitions Dollars And Transform Scholarly Communication, Christine N. Turner

University Libraries Presentations Series

No abstract provided.

I {Heart} Meetings... (Don't Stop Believin'), Ann Kardos

University Libraries Presentations Series

A presentation given at the December meeting of the Five College Cataloging & Metadata Group, regarding running better and more effective meetings.

Comparing Millennial Visitors To Wineries And Breweries In British Columbia: An Examination Of Social Involvement, Social Return, And Self-Image Congruency, Jarrett R. Bachman, John S. Hull, Sanja Haecker

TTRA Canada 2019 Conference

No abstract provided.

Understanding Millennial Interest In Participating In Wine Tourism - A Case Study On The Kamloops Wine Trail, British Columbia, Canada, John S. Hull, Jarrett R. Bachman, Sanja Haecker

TTRA Canada 2019 Conference

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Sustainable Local Food Among Tourism Stakeholders: A Comparative Study In Vancouver, Canada And Christchurch, New Zealand, Hiran Roy, C.Michael Hall, Paul W. Ballantine

TTRA Canada 2019 Conference

Local food is increasingly regarded as an element of sustainable tourism and hospitality. This study examines restaurant and chefs’ (tourism stakeholders) perceptions, motivations, and constraints in buying local food ingredients from local farmers’ market vendors on a study conducted in Vancouver, Canada and Christchurch, New Zealand. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with restaurants and chefs. The study identified that restaurants and chefs are most interested in perceived tangible benefit such as freshness, as well as more intangible motivations such as supporting local farmers and the local economy/community/businesses. However, they experienced challenges with purchasing. Based on the findings, strategies are posited for …

Young Parents’ Experiences And Perceptions Of ‘Teen Mom’ Reality Shows, Devon Greyson, Cathy Chabot, Jean A. Shoveller

Communication Department Faculty Publication Series

MTV’s hit reality shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom were produced with an agenda of preventing teen pregnancy. Researchers have examined their effectiveness as behavioral interventions, yet little attention has been paid to experiences of young parents themselves with these shows, nor to their ethical consequences, including the potential for compounding of stigma against young parents. This analysis qualitatively examines the experiences of young parents in British Columbia, Canada, with the media phenomenon referred to as ‘Teen Mom shows.’ Interview and observation data from a large, longitudinal, mixed-methods ethnographic study of young parents was analyzed using hybrid deductive-inductive qualitative …

Boxborough Economic Development Study: Phase 1, Technical Memo, Camille Barchers

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

The Town of Boxborough’s Economic Development Committee (EDC) contracted with the Center for Economic Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to produce an economic development study. Phase 1 of the study, conducted from September through December 2019 by Regional Planning Studio master’s students, began with an investigation of existing conditions and public opinion on economic development and concluded with four plausible future economic development scenarios designed to support the eventual creation of the Town’s long-term economic development plan.

Innovation Districts As A Strategy For Urban Economic Development: A Comparison Of Four Cases, Joshua Drucker, Carla Maria Kayanan, Henry Renski

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

Innovation districts are a relatively new strategy in urban economic development. They have been fast gaining attention and popularity, due in part to energetic third-party promotion and the apparent successes of two early adopters: Barcelona and Boston. As additional cities establish and promote innovation districts, it benefits policymakers to possess information regarding their characteristics and suitability as an economic development approach.

We conduct in-depth case studies of four innovation districts in the United States—located in Boston, Detroit, Saint Louis, and San Diego—that present contrasting settings, policies, and outcomes. The empirical information is drawn primarily from interviews with the innovation district …

Towards A Passenger Station On The East-West Massachusetts Train Line - The Case For Palmer, University Of Massachusetts Amherst Center For Economic Development, Umass Design Center

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

The purpose of this report is to examine the feasibility of the Town of Palmer becoming a passenger stop on a proposed East-West rail line that would connect to Union Station in Springfield and South Station in Boston. The report is presented in two parts. Part one presents the primary reasons that would make the case for a stop being placed in Palmer. The second presents a series of case studies to stimulate ideas on how Palmer could promote further growth through the creation of transit oriented development (TOD) around any future stop.

The findings in this report are based …

Flavonoid Intake And Plasma Sex Steroid Hormones, Prolactin, And Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin In Premenopausal Women, You Wu, Susan E. Hankinson, Stephanie A. Smith-Warner, Molin Wang, A. Heather Eliassen

Biostatistics and Epidemiology Faculty Publications Series

Background: Flavonoids potentially exert anti-cancer effects, as suggested by their chemical structures and supported by animal studies. In observational studies, however, the association between flavonoids and breast cancer, and potential underlying mechanisms, remain unclear. Objective: To examine the relationship between flavonoid intake and sex hormone levels using timed blood samples in follicular and luteal phases in the Nurses’ Health Study II among premenopausal women. Methods: Plasma concentrations of estrogens, androgens, progesterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), DHEA sulfate (DHEAS), prolactin, and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) were measured in samples collected between 1996 and 1999. Average flavonoid were calculated from semiquantitative food frequency questionnaires …

Sraffian Indeterminacy In General Equilibrium Revisited, Naoki Yoshihara, Se Ho Kwak

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In contrast to Mandler’s (1999a; Theorem 6) impossibility result about the Sraffian indeterminacy of the steady-state equilibrium, we first show that any regular Sraffian steady-state equilibrium is indeterminate in terms of Sraffa (1960) under the simple overlapping generation economy. Moreover, we also check that this indeterminacy is generic. These results are obtained by explicitly defining a simple model of overlapping generation economies with Leontief production techniques, in which we also explain the main source of the difference between our results and Mandler (1999a; section 6).

On The General Impossibility Of Persistent Unequal Exchange Free Trade Equilibria In The Pre-Industrial World Economy, Soh Kaneko, Naoki Yoshihara

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper analyzes the persistency of the unequal exchange of labor (UE) in international trade. An intertemporal model of a world economy is defined with a leisure preference and no discount factor. Every incompletely specialized free trade equilibrium is characterized as having non-persistent UE, which verifies the convergence of economies without relying on economic growth or diminishing returns to scale. In particular, it characterizes a sub- class of equilibria in which the sequence of real interest rates does not converge to zero, but UE tends to disappear while equivalently the distribution of capital assets tends to be equalized in the …

Is India’S Employment Guarantee Program Successfully Challenging Her Historical Inequalities?, Kartik Misra

Economics Department Working Paper Series

By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that the impact of NREGA is conditioned and complicated by historical inequalities in agricultural landownership which have persisted since the colonial period. I find that in the lean season of agriculture, the program is highly successful in raising wages and generating more public employment in districts that were not characterized by historically high levels of …

Economic Transition, Dualism, And Informality In India, Surbhi Kesar

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In much of the literature on economic development, sustained economic growth is expected to be accompanied by several interrelated processes of structure change, which involve a shift in economic activities from ‘traditional’ / agricultural / informal to ‘modern’ / industrial / formal sectors. Such transitions are usually accompanied by a transition in the economic dependence of households towards relatively ‘modern’ and formal segments of the economy, along with a rise in their general economic well-being. In this paper, we examine the Indian economy using the only available household-level pan-India panel data over the high growth period between 2005 and 2011-12, …

Partisanship And Local Fiscal Policy: Evidence From Brazilian Cities, Raphael Gouvea, Daniele Girardi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We study the role of political parties in shaping local fiscal policy in the context of Brazilian cities in the 2004-2016 period. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find no effect of left-wing mayors on the size of the city government nor on the allocation of spending across main budget categories (current spending, investment and personnel). We do find a modest, significant and robust positive effect on the share of social expenditures. The (close) election of a left-wing mayor tends to raise the share of social expenditures by around 0.6 percentage points in our preferred RD specification. We then explore possible …

What Is The Impact Of An Exogenous Shock To The Wage Share? Var Results For The Us Economy, 1973–2018, Deepankar Basu, Leila Gautham

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper uses a novel empirical strategy to present empirical estimates of the effect of an exogenous shock to distribution on demand and accumulation for the US economy from 1973 to 2018. We use recursive vector autoregressions to identify the impact of shocks to the wage share. We impose restrictions motivated by a simple neo-Kaleckian open- economy model, and build on the recursive identification scheme in Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1999) to show that this small set of plausible and transparent assumptions are sufficient to identify the impact of shocks to distribution. We find that positive shocks to the wage …

Persistent Exploitation With Intertemporal Reproducible Solution In Pre-Industrial Economies, Weikai Chen, Naoki Yoshihara

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper presents an intertemporal model of pre-industrial economies defined with leisure preference to study the condition of the emergence and persistence of exploitation as unequal exchange of labor. We show that pure workers are exploited in any finite periods if there is positive real profit rate, even though labor allocation among agents tends to be equalized in the limit regardless of the saving behaviors. The so-called Fundamental Marxian Theorem and Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle are generalized in the intertemporal setting with exploitation in the whole life, and the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle is established with exploitation within period.

Impact Of Development Aid On Infant Mortality: Micro-Level Evidence From Côte D’Ivoire, Didier Wayoro, Léonce Ndikumana

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The empirical literature has failed to reach consensus on the impact of aid on development outcomes based on aggregate cross-country analysis. This study follows the current trend in the literature on the effectiveness of aid to examine the impact of local-level aid on health outcomes. We combine data on World Bank’s geo-located aid projects with three rounds of Demographic Health Surveys from Côte d’Ivoire and use difference-in-difference estimation techniques to explore the effects of aid on infant mortality. We find that proximity to development aid projects is associated with reduced infant mortality. Our results are robust to mother fixed-effects estimations …

Dominance Of Majoritarian Politics And Hate Crimes Against Religious Minorities In India, 2009–2018, Deepankar Basu

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Using a novel state-level panel data set for the period 2009-18 on the incidence of hate crimes in India, and a difference in difference (DD) approach, this paper investigates the causal impact of the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP’s win in the 2014 national elections on hate crimes against religious minorities. Using 2009-13 (pre-election) and 2014-18 (post-election) as the before and after periods, I estimate a standard DD model, where the treatment group consists of states where BJP won the largest share of popular votes in 2014, to get an initial estimate of the causal impact. I strengthen this result with …

The Profit Rate In Chile: 1900-2010, Diego Polanco

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The interest of this paper is to discuss the main features that characterize the accumulation regimes that have taken place during the twentieth century in Chile. Understanding that a set of institutionalized compromises and political conflicts are inherent to any capitalist society, I rely on the body of literature of Marxist political economy, which focuses on the dynamics of profitability to describe its reproductive patterns. In light of this analysis, I argue that the main institutional transformations in Chilean history are better understood. I characterize long-waves of capitalist accumulation as accumulation regimes and identify three stages: early expansion, late expansion, …

Accumulation By Dispossession And Electoral Democracies: An Analysis Of Land Acquisition For Special Economic Zones In India, Kartik Misra

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Forcible acquisition of agricultural land to facilitate accumulation by dispossession attempts like setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) is fiercely resisted by farmers in India. These agitations may determine the political viability of governments. The ability if the state to enact and implement policies favoring accumulation by dispossession is determined by the political conflict between, on the one side, the elite and the state, and, on the other side, dispossessed farmers and landless agricultural workers. The outcome of this conflict is determined by the distribution of power in society and the success of different groups in mobilizing and enforcing …

Capital Flight, Foreign Direct Investment And Natural Resources In Africa, Léonce Ndikumana, Mare Sarr

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper provides theoretical and empirical insights into the puzzling simultaneous rise in foreign direct investment inflows in Africa and capital flight from the continent over the past decades. Indeed, paradoxically, even as African countries have become more attractive to foreign private capital, they have continued to experience capital exodus in the context of improved economic performance, especially since the turn of the century. This paper explores three questions. First, does foreign direct investment fuel capital flight as has been established in the case of external borrowing? In other words, is there an FDI-fueled capital flight phenomenon akin to debt-fueled …

Does Dynamic Market Competition With Technological Innovation Leave No One Behind?, Yongsheng Xu, Naoki Yoshihara

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In this paper, we examine the performance of the market mechanism by focusing on whether no one, in the ‘long-run’, can be left behind with technological innovation in the economy. We show that the market mechanism with technological innovation unavoidably leaves some individuals behind. We extend this negative result to a broader class of resource allocation mechanisms.

Asymmetric Majority Pillage Games, Manfred Kerber, Colin Rowat, Naoki Yoshihara

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper studies pillage games (Jordan in J Econ Theory 131.1:26-44, 2006, “Pillage and property”), which are well suited to modelling unstructured power contests. To enable empirical test of pillage games’ predictions, it relaxes a symmetry assumption that agents’ intrinsic contributions to a coalition’s power is identical. In the three-agent game studied: (i) only eight configurations are possible for the core, which contains at most six allocations; (ii) for each core configuration, the stable set is either unique or fails to exist; (iii) the linear power function creates a tension between a stable set’s existence and the interiority of its …

Capital Inflows, Sustained Investment Surges, And The Role Of External Economies Of Scale In A Developing Economy, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Standard open economy macro models with unemployment predict a contractionary short-run effect of international capital inflows. Empirical evidence, on the other hand, often associates such inflows with short-term booms, and developing country policy makers frequently go out of their way to welcome foreign capital. Employing a portfolio balance framework, this paper distinguishes between international financial (i.e., bond) and "real" (i.e., equity) flows to explore the different consequences for capital accumulation that may follow over the medium run. The presence of external economies of scale generates multiple equilibria, and different kinds of capital flows may push investment in one direction or …

Inequality In Energy Consumption: Statistical Equilibrium Or A Question Of Accounting Conventions?, Gregor Semieniuk, Isabella Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Mitigating climate change requires information about the inequality in energy consumption. Recent contributions (Banerjee and Yakovenko, 2010; Lawrence et al., 2013; Yakovenko, 2010, 2013) have studied energy inequality through the lens of maximum entropy. They claim a weighted international distribution of total primary energy demand should approach a Boltzmann-Gibbs maximum entropy equilibrium distribution in the form of an exponential distribution, implying convergence to a Gini coefficient of 0.5 from above. The present paper challenges the validity of this claim and critically discusses the applicability of statistical equilibrium reasoning to economics from the viewpoint of social accounting. It is shown that …

Technical Progress, Capital Accumulation, And Distribution, Naoki Yoshihara, Roberto Veneziani

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We study the effects of innovations on income distribution in capitalist economies characterised by a drive to accumulate. Consistent with the basic intuitions of Marx’s theory of technical change, we show that there is no obvious relation between ex-ante profitable innovations and the income distribution that actually emerges in equilibrium, and individually rational choices of technique do not necessarily lead to optimal outcomes. Innovations may even cause the disappearance of all equilibria. Methodologically, it is not possible to fully understand the ‘creative destruction’ induced by innovations without capturing the dialectic between individual choices and aggregate outcomes, and the complex network …