Economics Commons^™

Immigration Level And Its Impact On The United States Labor Market Tightness, Khai Quy La

Honors Theses

This research investigates the complex interplay between immigration labor and market equilibrium in the United States, focusing on the period from 2000 to 2019. By examining the correlation between the rate of net international migration and the unemployment-to-vacancy ratio (U/V) across 51 states, the study uncovers significant relationships that shed light on immigration dynamics in response to labor market conditions. The findings support the hypothesis that a decrease in the U/V ratio leads to an increase in immigration in the following period as immigrants seek improved job employment prospects.

Trading Perspectives: The Impact Of Gender In Shaping National Trade Policies, Katherine Kwiatkowski

Honors Theses

Economic and political factors have been shown to influence the trade policy decisions of national leaders. The impact of a national leader’s gender on their trade policy preferences remains an underexplored area of research. The increasing share of female national leaders raises the question of whether their policy preferences vary from those of male leaders because of their gender. In this study, I utilize the gender of a nation’s leader to implement a two-way fixed effects regression that analyzes the impact of gender on a leader’s trade policy preferences. Controlling for factors that could also impact a leader’s trade policy …

Debt And The Medicare Eligibility Discontinuity: Disparate Effects Across Households, Olivia Falck

Honors Theses

Public health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid have been shown to help reduce household debt caused by healthcare costs. The impact of health insurance literacy makes the relationship between public health programs and debt more ambiguous. The increasing complexity of Medicare raises the question of whether cost savings associated with enrollment might be mitigated by the complexity of choosing the ideal plan for those with low health insurance literacy. In this study, I utilize the Medicare eligibility cutoff at age 65 to implement a regression discontinuity design that analyzes the impact of Medicare eligibility on household debt and out …

Esg Reporting And Its Effect On Financial Performance Of Oil, Gas, And Utility Companies In The United States, Logan Lam

Honors Theses

According to the Harvard Business Review article ESG Investing Isn’t Designed to Save the Plant (Pucker and King 2022), the term ESG investments – which stands for environmental, social, and governance investing – often confuses investors because it is unregulated. Additionally, the author continued to claim that the data is outdated and mostly unaudited. Even if data on these investments is available to investors, it can still be challenging for them to make decisions regarding ESG. Trusting compatibility and accuracy can be difficult considering that companies can choose how to produce or calculate their own ESG data. Another claim that …

The Parental Labor Gap: The Impact Of Daycare Access On The Parental Labor Force During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Acacia Wyckoff

Honors Theses

In the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the landscape for work has shifted dramatically. Many companies and employers switched to telework when the pandemic hit, and many still do not require workers to come into the office. Research suggests these COVID-induced changes have led to a closing of the gap in childcare duties between men and women in households. Comparing parents in positions with telework eligibility versus in-person positions, Heggeness and Suri (2022) found that while telework improved the labor participation rate of mothers slightly, there was still a major gap in labor force participation between mothers and …

The 2015 Ncaa Cost-Of-Attendance Stipend And Its Effects On Institutional Financial Aid Packages, Sara Greene

Honors Theses

In 2015, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) allowed “Cost of Attendance” (COA) stipends to be offered to athletic recruits for Division I schools. These stipends are intended to allow schools to grant aid to student-athletes beyond a full-ride scholarship to cover additional costs imposed on student-athletes. These stipends created an opportunity for the “Autonomy” Power 5 programs to utilize a competitive tactic to try to win over the top recruits. There is evidence that these COA stipends have caused an increase in the estimated cost of attendance reported by the university. This paper examines if the COA stipends have …

Vietnam’S Gdp: Re-Assessing Growth Rate And Identifying An Alternative Indicator, My Linh D. Nguyen

Honors Theses

Since the economic reform known as Doi Moi (Renovation) in 1986, Vietnam has changed from one of the world’s poorest to a middle-income country in one generation (USAID, 2022). The country has consistently registered high and stable economic growth since the reform, averaging 6.3% from 1985 to 2021 (World Bank, 2022). High growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) is good news, but it has also raised questions that go both ways. On one side, there is much speculation that the government of Vietnam has manipulated economic statistics, compared to the case of China and India. As quoted in Kinh …

The Personal Saving Rate: Data Revisions And Forecasts, Dean Croushore, Pedro Del Monaco Santos

Economics Faculty Publications

Revisions to the U.S. personal saving rate are very large and may be predictable. We decompose the revisions of the personal saving rate into those caused by revisions to income and those caused by revisions to household outlays. We use our findings to explore the forecastability of future revisions of the personal saving rate.

Success Factors For Promoting Living Wages In Richmond Virginia, Alison Kent

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Nonprofit Studies Capstone Projects

Advancing living wages helps reduce poverty, enable individuals to realize their full societal potential, and support overall economic growth. In this paper, I describe a research project I undertook in Richmond, Virginia to identify impactful actions that can be taken to promote living wages. I identified the roles of organizations across different sectors and subsectors and how these organizations collaborate to drive living wages. I define the model that has evolved in Richmond, Virginia and I compare it to models employed in other communities. I close by identifying those components which are unique and powerful in the Richmond model and …

Economics Of Red Wolf Reintroduction, Logan West

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

In any animal reintroduction, one main component that is heavily evaluated is the economics of the reintroduction process of introducing an endangered animal to a specific area. Red wolves in specific, have a strong economic correlation between ecotourism and economics, as red wolves are an almost extinct species. In this analysis, I examined the economics of ecotourism as a benefit for red wolf reintroduction into the Delmarva. Additionally, I further examined how ecosystem services are an additional benefit to the economics in Delmarva. I used two case studies in my analysis to determine if the Delmarva Peninsula would enhance economically …

Non-Profits And Living Wages, Jack Buckley

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Nonprofit Studies Capstone Projects

Non-Profit organizations must find ways to divide their budgets between staff wages and program services, as well as paying their staff a living wage. Unlike for-profits who can increase prices for consumers when they need to increase staff wages, non-profits do not have this luxury. The goal of this project was to collect data on how non-profits manage their budgets and if they provide staff with living wages. A survey was sent out with a total of eight responses, giving a breakdown of various non-profit’s budgets and if they pay a living wage. Overall, seven out of eight non-profits pay …

Recessionary Effects On Transfer Fees In European Professional Football, Pierce Snyder

Honors Theses

Association football, most commonly referred to internationally as football, is the world’s most popular sport with billions of fans. Professional football leagues operate in countries all over the globe. While other continents have prominent and successful teams, Europe is the sport’s summit for the club level of competition. Europe boasts the best five leagues in the world, commonly referred to as “the big five”: the Bundesliga (Germany), La Liga (Spain), Ligue 1 (France), Premier League (England), and Serie A (Italy). In the 2016-2017 season, these five leagues accounted for 12.6 billion pounds—57.5 percent—of European football’s revenues of about 21.9 billion …

[Introduction To] Religion And The Medieval And Early Modern Global Marketplace, Scott Oldenburg, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Bookshelf

Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the intersection, conflict, and confluence of religion and the market before 1700.

Each chapter analyzes the unique interplay of faith and economy in a different locale: Syria, Ethiopia, France, Iceland, India, Peru, and beyond. In ten case studies, specialists of archaeology, art history, social and economic history, religious studies, and critical theory address issues of secularization, tolerance, colonialism, and race with a fresh focus. They chart the tensions between religious and economic thought in specific locales or texts, the complex ways …

Identity For Development: India’S Biometric Id Program And Access To Public And Private Services, Meher Kaur

Honors Theses

Since its rollout in 2009, Aadhaar, India’s biometric identification system, has generated unique IDs for nearly 95% of India’s population. Since 2009, a variety of public and private services in India have been linked to Aadhaar. This linkage is intended to improve access to public welfare and private services for marginalized groups, such as third gender individuals and rurally located groups, who were historically left out of public welfare programs due to the absence of formal identification. However, there is a general lack of research on how effective Aadhaar is in linking individuals to state and private services and how …

[Introduction To] Paradoxes Of Care: Children And Global Medical Aid In Egypt., Rania Kassab Sweis

Bookshelf

Each year, billions of dollars are spent on global humanitarian health initiatives. These efforts are intended to care for suffering bodies, especially those of distressed children living in poverty. But as global medical aid can often overlook the local economic and political systems that cause bodily suffering, it can also unintentionally prolong the very conditions that hurt children and undermine local aid givers. Investigating medical humanitarian encounters in Egypt, Paradoxes of Care illustrates how child aid recipients and local aid experts grapple with global aid's shortcomings and its paradoxical outcomes.

Rania Kassab Sweis examines how some of the world's largest …

Sustainability In The Fashion Industry: Two Case Studies Highlighting Consumer Purchasing Actions Related To Brand Sustainability, Allison Zhang

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

The rise of competition in the fashion industry has called for companies to differentiate themselves. One way of differentiation that has been seen in recent years is an increase in sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. This paper explores the use of press releases by fashion companies to see if the releases impact the companies’ bottom line. The purpose of this study was to evaluate if sustainability related press releases impact consumers in the United States decision making in purchasing products or supporting certain brands or companies. To conduct this study, yearly and quarterly financial data was collected to find trends …

Fast Poisson Estimation With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects, Sergio Correia, Paulo Guimarães, Thomas Zylkin

Economics Faculty Publications

In this paper we present ppmlhdfe, a new Stata command for estimation of (pseudo) Poisson regression models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects (HDFE). Estimation is implemented using a modified version of the iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) algorithm that allows for fast estimation in the presence of HDFE. Because the code is built around the reghdfe package, it has similar syntax, supports many of the same functionalities, and benefits from reghdfe’s fast convergence properties for computing high-dimensional least squares problems. Performance is further enhanced by some new techniques we introduce for accelerating HDFE-IRLS estimation specifically ppmlhdfe also implements a novel and …

Profitability And Corporate Social Responsibility, Alexander Kirk

Honors Theses

This project examines the relationship between net margins and measures of corporate social responsibility for the companies in the S&P 500 index. This is conducted through linear regressions of overall, environmental, social, and governance scores on net margin percentages for firms from their annual 10-K reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The corporate social responsibility measures were taken from Sustainalytics via Yahoo Finance and combined with dummy variables for Global Industry Classification Standard sectors. Results indicate very limited role in corporate social responsibility measures for predicting net margins, instead favoring sector specific variables as driving net margins to …

Tuition Resets: An Economic Analysis, Claire Mendelson

Honors Theses

American higher education today is defined by rising tuition and decreasing enrollment. As higher education institutions prepare for a looming enrollment crisis, tuition resets – when colleges or universities decrease their sticker price of tuition – are becoming a newly popular strategy. Although much research has been done regarding the economics of higher education and what influences tuition, no quantitative research study has been done on tuition resets. This research study contributes to the existing literature by quantitatively testing the effect of a tuition reset on an institution’s financial health, as measured by net tuition revenue from students and undergraduate …

Estimating Value-At-Risk Of An Unconventional Portfolio, Elizabeth N. Mejía-Ricart

Honors Theses

Since the 2008 financial crisis, interest rates and bond yields have been low all through the recovery and expansion that followed, and they are still low. As a result, more investors have been attracted to US equities, a space of possibly higher returns. However, these returns come with a potential downside: risk of loss. One of the methods to assess this potential downside is value-at-risk (VaR), which gained momentum in the late 1990s. At the time, the market risk amendment to the 1988 Basle Capital Accord required commercial banks with significant trading activities to put aside capital to cover market …

Internal Migration Of Foreign-Born In Us: Impacts Of Population Concentration And Risk Aversion, Thin Yee Mon Su

Honors Theses

Internal migration in the US has been declining since the 1990s and research has mostly focused on labor market dynamics and aging population to explain the migration trends. This paper analyzes migration patterns of foreign-born groups in the US from 2000 to 2019. Along with the migration determinants such as education and employment, the paper focuses on population concentration as a factor that shapes foreign-born decisions to relocate in the US. Population concertation is defined to be a measure of how geographically concentrated each foreign-born group is across the US. I find that the likelihood of migrating to another state …

The Effect Of President Trump’S Company-Specific Tweets On Company’S Stocks, Justin Kleczka

Honors Theses

Implementing event-study analysis, I find that President Trump’s tweets about publicly traded companies cause daily abnormal returns of 0.25% in a company’s stock in the same direction as the sentiment of the tweet: positive tweets increase abnormal returns by 0.25% on the day’s end, while negative tweets will cause -0.25% abnormal returns.

Additionally, I find that President Trump’s company-specific tweets increase the daily abnormal trading volume and volatility of a company’s stock by 19%, regardless of tweet sentiment. For abnormal returns and abnormal trading volume, the effects of President Trump’s tweets do not last multiple days after a tweet. However, …

[Introduction To] Debating Sex Work, Lori Watson, Jessica Flanigan

Bookshelf

In this 'for and against' work, ethicists Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan debate the criminalization of sex work. Watson argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized, known as the Nordic Model. Flanigan argues that sex work should be fully decriminalized because decriminalization ensures respect for sex workers' and clients' rights, and is more effective than alternative policies.

Putting these two views on sex work into conversation with one another, and opening up space for readers to weigh both approaches, the book provides a thorough, accessible exploration of the issues surrounding …

Antecedents To The Crisis: Mandeville, Smith, And Keynes, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to present the methods of teaching about the global financial crisis (GFC) from a social economic perspective. Using primary texts from the history of economic thought, the moral underpinnings for collective social action are examined in times of economic depression. The deregulation of financial markets raises two questions: to what extent is deregulation the result of a misunderstanding about human nature and the behavioral lessons of social economics; and to what extend does deregulation ignore the moral lessons of Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

Setting An Agenda For The Future, Sam Allgood, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

Anniversaries are a time for reflection and planning for the future. The fiftieth year of the Journal of Economic Education motivated us to invite those who have been intimately involved with the Journal to provide reflections, which appear within this symposium. In addition to providing a wealth of information about the past, they set the stage for initiatives that support the path forward.

Teaching Courses In Macroeconomics And Monetary Policy With Bloomberg Analytics, Dean D. Croushore, Hossein S. Kazemi

Economics Faculty Publications

In this article, the authors illustrate the use of Bloomberg for analyzing topics in macroeconomics and monetary policy in economics and finance courses. The hands-on experience that students gain from such a course has many benefits, including deeper learning and clearer understanding of data. The authors describe goals and learning objectives, then compare Bloomberg with Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). In addition, they provide examples of how to use Bloomberg in the classroom, describe how to have students perform sector analysis, show how Bloomberg tools are useful for analyzing monetary policy, discuss how to use Bloomberg to analyze the financial …

Fiscal Surprises At The Fomc, Dean D. Croushore, Simon Van Norden

Economics Faculty Publications

We examine a new set of U.S. fiscal forecasts from FOMC briefing books. The forecasts were precisely those presented to monetary policymakers and include frequently updated estimates covering six complete business cycles and several fiscal-policy regimes. We detail the performance of forecast federal expenditures, revenues, surpluses, and structural surpluses in terms of accuracy, bias, and efficiency. We find that forecast errors can be economically large, even at relatively short forecast horizons. While economic activity became less volatile after 1990, fiscal policy became harder to forecast. Finally, cyclically adjusted deficit forecasts appear to be overoptimistic around both business cycle peaks and …

Currency Unions And Trade: A Ppml Re-Assessment With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects, Mario Larch, Joschka Wanner, Yoto V. Yotov, Thomas Zylkin

Economics Faculty Publications

Recent work on the effects of currency unions (CUs) on trade stresses the importance of using many countries and years in order to obtain reliable estimates. However, for large samples, computational issues associated with the three-way (exporter-time, importer-time, and country-pair) fixed effects currently recommended in the gravity literature have heretofore limited the choice of estimator, leaving an important methodological gap. To address this gap, we introduce an iterative Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimation procedure that facilitates the inclusion of these fixed effects for large data sets and also allows for correlated errors across countries and time. When applied to a …

Rationality, Revisions, And Real-Time Data, Jason Hall

Honors Theses

Revisions to macroeconomic variables are a significant part of the process by which researchers, the general public, and the government get information about the state of the United States' economy. They are also substantial: this can have large implications for forecasting, macroeconomic research, business decisions, and monetary and fiscal policy. In this paper, I examine the cyclicality of various aggregate variables in U.S.data, and determine that of the major NIPA variables analyzed, only consumption andreal imports revisions display a large degree of cyclicality. I also examine the rationalityof the same set of variables under different definitions of the final value, …

The Relationship Between Housing Price And Proximity To Public Land In Denver, Co, Connor Wyman

Honors Theses

This study examines how proximity to public lands influences housing values. This will be done using a hedonic pricing strategy, which is useful when analyzing heterogeneous goods such as a house or apartment. The data for this study comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) of Denver, CO from 2010 and 2017. This study also includes four variables related to distance from large open public spaces: one each for the distance from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Cherry Creek State Park, and Chatfield State Park. Multiple linear regressions were used to analyze the …