Digital Commons Network^™

Coming Together Through Object Based Learning In A Pandemic, Brian Sheehy, Michael Sandstrom, John Heeg

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

In the summer of 2019, three history teachers from all over the US, met in France for National History Day’s Memorializing the Fallen program and commenced a lasting friendship. While in France, touring the WWI cemeteries, memorial sites, and museums, we all realized the importance of experience-based learning and the seeds were sown for our interest in object based learning. Aside from the philosophical and pedagogical discussions on long bus rides and our passion for history, we shared a belief in the importance of revitalizing history education and helping it to evolve in the face of our twenty-first century world. …

Beyond Pandemic Pedagogy: Thoughts On Deconstruction, Structure, And Justice Post-Pandemic, Samantha Cutrara

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

No abstract provided.

Gas Stations And The Wealth Divide: Analyzing Spatial Correlations Between Wealth And Fuel Branding, Jean-Carl Ende

Dissertations and Theses

The gasoline refining and sales industry has many peculiarities. One such oddity is a difference in sales, distribution and pricing between branded and unbranded gasolines. Although fuels leave the refinery a uniform commodity, branding determines entirely different marketing and pricing schemes, with entirely different volatility and risk premiums. In order to determine if this volatility is felt evenly across all wealth demographics, this study uses t-tests and CART models to analyze income, home value and other wealth-based indicators in the areas surrounding gas stations, to determine if there is a correlation between branding and wealth. The results show the wealth …

Demand Forecasting For Lucky Cement, Muhammad Arsalan Rashid

CBER Conference

As we know that demand is the Quantities of a good or service that people are ready to buy at various prices within some given time, other factors besides price held constant I tried to forecast the sales for next years. I removed seasonality factors and applied other determinants to predict the demand. By using values of independent variables in my Regression, the Annual Sales of Lucky Cement for period 2020-2021 is found to be around 7.9 Million Tons.

Regional Economic Impacts Of China's High-Speed Rail Development And Its Institutional Challenges, Hankun Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This article studies the impact of connecting to high-speed rail (HSR) network on regional development and the replication and sustainability of China’s GIUR system, aiming to summarize the experience of China’s HSR, which can provide several policy references for developing countries. This article conducts two research: (1) explore the impact of connecting to HSR network on the urban industrial structure, urban creativity and urban-rural income gap of cities in different regions and cities with heterogeneous locations along the HSR lines in the long and short term; (2) explore the advantages and disadvantages of the Government-Industry-University-Research (GIUR) system in the process …

The Effects Of Renewable Portfolio Standards And The Deregulation Of Energy Markets On Electricity Prices, Amani Chaar

Spectra Undergraduate Research Journal

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are public policies put into effect to help alleviate the harmful consequences of air pollution. Every state has a unique form of standards corresponding to their natural resources. More states have implemented the policy to increase the generation of renewable energy; however, many stand opposed to the policy in fear that it will increase electricity prices. The influence that RPS has on the price of electricity is not entirely understood. Previous literature confirms that RPS, on average, increases prices by three percent. This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of RPS on electricity rates over a …

What Is The Impact Of Economic Stimulus Measures On Covid-19 Mortality Rates?, Stephanie C. Santaguida

University Honors Theses

This inquiry seeks to establish the degree to which economic stimulus measures impact COVID-19 mortality rates. There appears to be an inverse correlation between domestic social spending and COVID-19 deaths. While confirmed infections are the most reliable predictor of mortality rates, trust in government is an important factor to consider when public compliance with health directives determines the degree of epidemiological risk in each country. Although most economists agree that stimulus monies directed to low-income individuals to prevent financial collapse were appropriate, there is some dissention with regard to the type and size of such cash infusions. Nonetheless, behavioral economists …

Hemp Production Network Effects: Are Producers Tipped Toward Suboptimal Varietal Selection By Their Neighbors?, Tanner Mccarty, Jeffrey Young

Journal of Applied Farm Economics

The 2018 farm bill removed industrial hemp from the Schedule 1 Controlled Substance List. In response, states scrambled to enact hemp legislation. Some hemp flower producers report their hemp fields were cross- pollinated by a neighbor growing a different hemp cultivar. For hemp flower crops, cross- pollination reduces cannabinoid concentration levels within the flower; these concentration levels dictate flower price. We show that in a repeated game, once a sufficiently large percentage of growers decide to plant hemp fiber/seed crops, cross-pollination forces flower growers to convert to fiber/seed to avoid the negative network externality. Over time, a stable, suboptimal Nash …

Is Habit A Powerful Policy Instrument To Induce Prosocial Behavioral Change?, Johann Caro-Burnett, Judith A. Chevalier, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Recent literature suggests the power of interventions to change habits. In a dense slum in Nairobi, we adopt best practices from the habit literature to encourage toilet use instead of alternatives that damage community health. Offering subsidies increased toilet usage, effects continue for one month after discounts end, but erode thereafter. Treatments designed to induce habit formation (marketing, time-limited discounts encouraging repetition, discounts for longer periods, targeting `habitual types’) generated no greater persistence. We see some persistent behavior change due to learning about the new toilet option. It appears difficult to induce pro-social behavior without private benefits through habit change.

Information Perception And Climate Change Adaptation, Ji Won Sung

Undergraduate Economic Review

Despite 97% of scientists believing that climate change is occurring, a far smaller proportion of ordinary citizens agree with this statement and the proportion of those who do greatly diverge by political affiliation. This paper lays out a dynamic information updating model with adaptation choice as the final outcome, linking information perception, belief perception, and behavioral implementation. Furthermore, this paper examines how various behavioral and environmental factors affect the agent’s adaptation choices by means of such cognitive processes. This research has implications for further research on climate change preference formation and effective communication strategies, such as informative or normative nudges.

Examining Future Expansion Opportunities At The Morgantown Industrial Park, Brian Lego, Christiadi

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

The Morgantown Industrial Park (MIP) encompasses a wide area between the Monongahela River and Interstate-79, and currently houses approximately 20 companies. A new interchange on Interstate 79 at River Road (approximately mile marker 151) is expected to improve access to the industrial park in a substantial manner, allowing expanded access into the MIP and creating the opportunity to house a variety of new businesses from several sectors. In this study, we provide a brief look at the North Central West Virginia region’s economic and demographic characteristics as a means of assessing the area’s viability and attractiveness to potential businesses. Measures …

The Dark Side Of Transparency In Developing Countries: The Link Between Financial Reporting Practices And Corruption, Tingting Liu, Yu Liu, Barkat Ullah, Zuobao Wei, Lixin Colin Xu

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This paper examines the impact of financial reporting practices on corruption obstacles for about 150,000 firms across 143 mostly developing countries from 2006 to 2019. We document a strong positive relationship between the production of audited financial statements (AFS) and corruption obstacles (CO) faced by the firm. We argue that in a corrupt business environment, rent-seeking bureaucrats use the credible financial information to optimize their bribe demands. Our baseline results remain robust after addressing endogeneity concerns. We further show that country-level institutional quality has a moderating effect on the AFS-CO relation. The evidence from surveying entrepreneurs also …

Identifying Latent Group Structures In Nonlinear Panels, Wuyi Wang, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a procedure to identify latent group structures in nonlinear panel data models where some regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group number and membership are unknown. To identify the group structures, we consider the order statistics for the preliminary unconstrained consistent estimators of the regression coefficients and translate the problem of classification into the problem of break detection. Then we extend the sequential binary segmentation algorithm of Bai (1997) for break detection from the time series setup to the panel data framework. We demonstrate that our method is able to identify …

The Legacy Of Car-Share And Light-Rail Transit For Mobility And Accessibility Improvements In Economically Marginalized Neighborhoods In The New York Metro Area, Kyeongsu Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the value of the car-share program and a new light rail system with respect to their impact on mobility and accessibility improvements in economically and transportation access-wise marginalized neighborhoods in NYC and its adjacent communities. It consists of three main essays that took deep dives into how each new service or system altered mobility or accessibility for those in need. The first essay (Chapter 2) investigates car-share vehicle utilization rates of the Zipcar across NYC. It assesses the utilization rates by vehicle type, service location, time period, and weekday usage compared to weekend activity. With a multivariate …

A Review On Literatures Of Islamic Financial Institutions And Market Between 2010 – 2020, Muhammad Ridhwan Ab. Aziz

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The objective of this article is to analyze and examine the related literatures on Islamic financial institutions and market between 2010 until 2020. The methodology of this article is through descriptive research based on document analysis on previous studies and literatures on Islamic financial institutions and market from free-of-charge and free-of-registration online journals. The journals and articles are obtained from several sources which are google scholar, science direct and researchgate.com. Data from 74 articles related in this field were collected and statistically analyzed using the Statistical Product & Services Solution (SPSS) software. This study looked at several variables which include …

Long-Run Effects On Employment Rates Of Local Demand Shocks, Across And Within Local Labor Markets, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper estimates the long-run effects on a county’s prime-age employment rate of labor demand shocks to both the county and its overlying commuting zone (CZ). These effects are allowed to vary with local “distress” (baseline employment rate of the county or CZ), and with the size of the demand shock. In more distressed CZs, a county’s employment rate is more affected by county or CZ shocks. As a result, targeting or reallocating jobs to more distressed CZs will tend to raise employment rates. If a county is relatively distressed compared to its CZ, targeting job shocks at that county …

Corona's Bio-Economic Crisis And The Post-Corona World, Cyrus Bina

Economics & Management Publications

While pandemics are pervasive, this is for the first time that the capitalist mode of production reached the outer limits of biology, biosphere, ecology, economy, geography, and international relations in unison resulting in an all-encompassing crises that devastated the entire planet. The upshot of this pandemic has overwhelmed the infrastructure of public health across the globe with stunning speed and with infections in millions in just a few months and the velocity of economic damage and devastation much worse than the Great Depression of the last century. It is also the “proof of the pudding” for the “conquest of mode …

Measuring Local Job Distress, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this paper, estimates are presented on short-run effects of demand shocks on a local labor market’s employment to population ratio (employment rate). Based on the estimates, commuting zones (CZs) better define a local labor market than counties, because both employment and employment rate effects exhibit large spillovers across counties within a CZ. In addition, the estimates suggest that demand shock effects vary, by an amount that is both statistically and substantively significant, with a CZ’s prior overall employment rate.

Nevada's Plan For Recovery And Resilience, Sri International, Rcg Economics, Brookings Mountain West

Policy Briefs and Reports

The report that follows contains the following components:

• An economic forecast from RCG Economics on the situation expected for Nevada—GDP and employment—in the fall of 2021 (subject to all the present uncertainties faced by Nevada and the country as a whole).
• A series of immediate actions, in which GOED plays a leadership role, to shelter and prepare for recovery key components of Nevada’s economy. The particular focus is on “Main Street” and small and medium sized businesses.
• A set of visionary strategies, firmly grounded in Nevada’s underlying assets, that will accelerate the diversification of the state’s economy and the transition …

The Productivity Consequences Of Pollution-Induced Migration In China, Gaurav Khanna, Wenquan Liang, A. Mushfiq Mobarak, Ran Song

Discussion Papers

Migration and pollution are two defining features of China's impressive growth performance over the last 30 years. In this paper we study the migration response to pollution in Chinese cities, and its consequences for productivity and welfare. We document a robust pattern in which skilled workers emigrate more in response to pollution than the unskilled. Their greater sensitivity to air quality holds up in cross-sectional variation across cities, panel variation with individual fixed-effects, and when instrumenting for pollution using distant power-plants upwind of cities, or thermal inversions that trap pollution. Pollution therefore changes the spatial distribution of skilled and unskilled …

Airbnb Release Of Latent Economic Value And Return To Equilibrium, Daniel Joseph Trujillo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We empirically consider Airbnb’s effect on a new variable in Short Term Rental (STR) research, second homes, employing a model pre-Airbnb diffusion (2009), and post-Airbnb diffusion (2019). In doing so we test our hypothesis that second home use will be converted to short-term rentals with the advent of Airbnb. We do so through a natural experiment examining housing stock. We create a schema to segregate tourist and non-tourist counties based on economic variables and deploy these in our research framework observing a shock to housing supply. Notably, we observe a structural change in the use of second homes resulting in …

Technical Efficiency Of Milkfish Production In The Province Of Iloilo, Philippines, Lylve Maliz L. Zeller, Salvador P. Catelo, Nora Dm. Carambas

Journal of Economics, Management and Agricultural Development

The Philippine aquaculture sector is primarily dominated by milkfish, with the province of Iloilo as one of the key producing areas. However, the production in the province has exhibited a decreasing trend since 2011. In this light, this study is undertaken to determine the technical efficiency of milkfish production in the province of Iloilo and identify the factors that significantly affect such efficiency. Utilizing the maximum likelihood estimation method, a Cobb-Douglas production function was specified to estimate farm-level efficiency using the data from 181 milkfish producers interviewed. The technical efficiency scores ranged between 12.38% to 90.00%, with a mean of …

Student Achievement In Rhode Island Charter Schools: A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Edward Golas

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

Using standardized test results from the school year 2018-19 this study compares the performance of 3rd through 8th graders in Rhode Island charter schools to their peers in traditional public schools (TPSs). This study also uses OLS techniques to test if Rhode Island charter schools help to bridge the achievement gap between minority (black and Hispanic) students and white students. The results show that in approximately ¾ of comparable instances, Rhode Island charter schools outperform TPSs on both English and math standardized tests. Additionally, it was found that Hispanic students attending a charter school are predicted to score higher on …

The Relationship Between Transportation Accessibility And Economic Development, Abigail Kiggen

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the possible relationship between transportation infrastructure accessibility and economic development in a given region. The study will incorporate data from counties in the state of Massachusetts to compare development from previous studies in the New York area. The independent variable will be transportation infrastructure accessibility, and the dependent variable will be measures of economic development. The results show that there are generally not correlations between better accessibility and economic development in a given region.

We All Want To Change The World: How Behavioral Insights Can Help Reduce Carbon Emissions, Thomas C. Gifford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented environmental crisis driven primarily by human behavior. As the world has globalized, countries have developed, and standards of living have improved, global pollution has skyrocketed and has resulted in a wide range of environmentally destructive outcomes. All paths to environmentally sustainable development involve a dramatic cut in carbon emissions from current day levels. In this thesis, I explore how the omission of behavioral factors from mainstream neoclassical models has contributed to, and can aid in reducing unsustainably high levels of carbon emissions. Throughout the history of economic thought, classical economists such …

Looking For Better: A History Of Black Southern Migrations, Selena Sanderfer Doss

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

A broad overview of migrations affecting black southerners is presented, including the Atlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, colonization movements to Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Exoduster movement, the Great Migration, and the Return South migration. Emigrants convey their experiences and motivations through testimonies and personal accounts. Surviving the trauma of forced migrations, black southerners organized numerous migration movements both outside and within American polities in search of better opportunities. In the late 20th century, black southerners also initiated a return migration to the American South and have since achieved notable socioeconomic and political progress.

Empowering Women For The United Nations Decade Of Ocean Science For Sustainable Development, World Maritime University

Reports

No abstract provided.

The Road Less Traveled: Economic Analysis Of Roads And Highways, Margaret C. Bock

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Roads are an integral component of civilization, connecting people, markets, and ideas. In different settings and geographies, roads can take on many different purposes. In rural, more isolated areas, roads can serve as a cost-saving benefit and can be used as tools to increase accessibility. In urban, more congested areas, roads can be seen as an externality-producing hindrance. Naturally, given this view, the overall analysis of roads should reflect these different settings. To date, however, the study of roads in the economics literature has surprisingly large pitfalls, notably in terms of topics of study and methodologies used.

Spending on roads …

An Evaluation Of Databases Drawn From The National Survey Of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-Ssats), Brian Cushing, Elham Erfanian

Other

Appalachia has been at the center of the drug crisis that has now exploded across the United States, wreaking havoc on communities and destroying lives. Other than a brief, hopeful leveling off in 2018, drug use and overdose deaths have continued to accelerate. One key focus of policies aimed at dealing with the crisis has been treatment and recovery resources, which provide critical support for those struggling with addiction. The Appalachian Regional Commission wishes to document the distribution of treatment and recovery resources within Appalachia, which is critical to assessing unmet needs. The following report describes, reviews, and evaluates the …

A Regional Comparative Analysis On The Role Of Electoral Politics In The Decline Of Africa's Public Sector, Mark Opoku Amankwa, Kofi Agyabeng

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

The early post-independence periods saw Africa have efficient Public Sector Institutions. Over a decade, there seems to be a decadent in the public sector. The study examines the regional analysis of government effectiveness in Africa. The study uses data given by the World Bank's Governance Indicator from 55 African countries from 2002 to 2018. The study uses Panel Regression Analysis Model of Random Effects and Pooled Ordinary Least Squares to assess government effectiveness in the five regions of Africa. The findings indicate that Southern African countries performed best as compared to its counterpart regions, followed by North Africa. However, East, …