Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Financial Outcomes From Selection Of Insurance Intervals, Shana Anderson Stewart

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the potential value of enrolling in rainfall-index for pasture, rangeland, and forage insurance for Utah producers. A stochastic optimization model is used to identify the optimal selection of insurance intervals that will provide the maximum indemnity payments less premiums. Four Utah counties were selected for analysis. Results indicate that positive returns will occur greater than 60% of the time in all counties with the selected insurance intervals. The optimal months to insure varied in each county.

Lobbying Legislation And Cumulative Abnormal Returns, Brenan Stewart

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (Pub.L. 110-81, 121 Stat. 735, enacted September 14, 2007) was passed by the U.S. Congress in order “to strengthen public disclosure requirements concerning lobbying activity and funding. It placed more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.” Treating this event as a natural experiment, we examine how this legislation affected the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CARs) of firms that lobbied in the year(s) leading up to the passing of the legislation. We find that companies that lobbied in the …

Bounded Rationality And The Choice Of Jury Selection Procedures, Martin Van Der Linden

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

A peremptory-challenge procedure allows the parties to a jury trial to dismiss some prospective jurors without justification. Complex challenge procedures offer an unfair advantage to parties who are better able to strategize. I introduce a new measure of strategic complexity based on level-k thinking and use this measure to compare challenge procedures often used in practice. In applying this measure, I overturn some commonly held beliefs about which jury selection procedures are strategically simple.

Is Uber A Substitute Or Complement For Public Transit?, Jonathan D. Hall, Craig Palsson, Joseph Price

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

How Uber affects public transit ridership is a relevant policy question facing cities worldwide. Theoretically, Uber’s effect on transit is ambiguous: while Uber is an alternative mode of travel, it can also increase the reach and flexibility of public transit’s fixed-route, fixed-schedule service. We estimate the effect of Uber on public transit ridership using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across U.S. metropolitan areas in both the intensity of Uber penetration and the timing of Uber entry. We find that Uber is a complement for the average transit agency, increasing ridership by five percent after two years. This average effect …

The Effects Of Economic Policy Uncertainty On Common Stock And American Depository Receipts, Bradley David Zynda Ii

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Uncertainty can have profound implications on both firms and individuals who hope to optimally make decisions in their best interest. In this research, I seek to examine the impact that economic policy uncertainty has on domestic and foreign stock. In particular, I take a market microstructure perspective focused on stock liquidity and volatility measures in response to changes in economic policy uncertainty. Understanding the directional flow of economic policy uncertainty and the magnitude of the consequences at home and abroad can both help prepare agents to make good decisions about the future and exhort policy makers to be more efficient …

Ask A Catbrarian: Marketing Library Services Using A Cat, Teagan Eastman, Jennifer Saulnier, Kati Richardson

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

This case study aims to describe how employees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Undergraduate Library (UGL) utilized a cat mascot as part of a marketing campaign to promote awareness of library resources and services and to overcome undergraduate students’ library anxiety. The authors describe how the idea of a cat mascot emerged, how librarians determined campaign objectives, and the process they undertook for developing videos, social media posts, events and displays for the campaign. This article also describes how the campaign was able to build a sense of community not only among the large university library system but …

The Nfl And Trump: Did Protesting Cause The Decline?, Jameson Osmond

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This project is a study in econometric modeling of the effects of the protests of the national anthem in the NFL during the 2016-2017 seasons. The project is created to determine the accuracy or lack thereof of President Donald Trump's statement that the cause of the decline in viewership and ratings (and thus business) of NFL games was caused by protests that deterred US viewers.

Using viewership and rating data, along with various protest indexes created by collecting game-level protest data, an econometric model was constructed to allow for control over various endogenous and exogenous variables that surround NFL in-season …

Primed For Death: Law Enforcement-Citizen Homicides, Social Media, And Retaliatory Violence, Vladimir Bejan, Matthew Hickman, William S. Parkin, Veronica F. Pozo

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

We examine whether retaliatory violence exists between law enforcement and citizens while controlling for any social media contagion effect related to prior fatal encounters. Analyzed using a trivariate dynamic structural vector-autoregressive model, daily time-series data over a 21-month period captured the frequencies of police killed in the line of duty, police deadly use of force incidents, and social media coverage. The results support a significant retaliatory violence effect against minorities by police, yet there is no evidence of retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers by minorities. Also, social media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement increases the risk of …