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210— Factors Affecting Teenage Pregnancy In The Philippines, Tashi Sherpa

GREAT Day Posters

The Philippines has one of the highest adolescent birth rates among the Southeast Asian countries. In 2019, the Philippines National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) declared the number of teenage pregnancies a "national social emergency". Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines, realized the urgency as the Commission on Population and Development in 2019 recorded that almost seven girls, aged ten to fourteen, gave birth everyday- 2,411 girls that year. Teenage pregnancy prevents the opportunity for women to escape from poverty and improve their human development levels. Increased risk of these outcomes are predominantly caused by inadequate sex education, lack …

Community Health Assessment: Van Buren County, Kathleen Bolter, Jim Robey, Gerrit Anderson, W.E. Upjohn Institute For Employment Research

Reports

No abstract provided.

Algorithm Is Experiment: Machine Learning, Market Design, And Policy Eligibility Rules, Yusuke Narita, Kohei Yata

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Algorithms produce a growing portion of decisions and recommendations both in policy and business. Such algorithmic decisions are natural experiments (conditionally quasirandomly assigned instruments) since the algorithms make decisions based only on observable input variables. We use this observation to develop a treatment-effect estimator for a class of stochastic and deterministic algorithms. Our estimator is shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal for well-defined causal effects. A key special case of our estimator is a high-dimensional regression discontinuity design. The proofs use tools from differential geometry and geometric measure theory, which may be of independent interest.

The practical performance of …

Workforce And Demographic Profile Of Berrien, Cass, And Van Buren Counties, Jim Robey

Reports

The Whirlpool Corporation, located in Benton Harbor Charter Township, asked the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to develop a dashboard of indicators portraying the current and future (where possible) “economic” health of the region.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Inefficiency Spillover Effects In European Countries, Levent Kutlu, Ran Wang

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

In our study, we examine whether spatial spillover effects exist for greenhouse gas emission efficiency for 38 European countries between 2005 and 2014. We find that inefficiencies of other countries would lead to lower efficiency levels for a country. This negative inefficiency spillover effect goes down till 2008 then goes up till 2011, then stays relatively stable after 2011. Any strategy to reduce inefficiencies of other countries could potentially improve the efficiency levels. We find that human development index shows significant positive impact on greenhouse gas emission efficiency levels. In particular, one standard deviation increase in human development index would …

Ward 7 And The Hough Neighborhood: Insights From Regional And Local Data, Jim Robey

Reports

No abstract provided.

Ursinus College Women's Investment Management Company, Taylor Beaumont, Shannon Blessing, Olivia Defusco, Julia Ewing, Angela Gervasi, Wendy Luo, Eve Peiffer, Becca Lewis, Ellie Templeton, Emily Benning, Rebecca Lam, Maddy Sorokanych, Theodora Zeibekis, Marcella Thanh-Guyet, Delanie Rogers

Business and Economics Presentations

The Ursinus College Investment Management Company (UCIMCO) consists of groups of student analysts who manage endowment-style and stock selection funds on behalf of the college endowment. In 2020, a group of women students began to manage their own fund. This presentation reviews activities of the previous year and analyzes the stock performance of various companies including: Anthem, Inc., American Well Corporation, SNAP, Inc., Yatsen Holdings Ltd. and Yum China Holdings.

Crisis And Catalonia: An Analysis On The Impact Of Crisis On The Public Opinion Of The Secessionist Movement In Catalonia, Rachel Ducker

Honors Theses

Catalonia, the autonomous region of Spain has seen an increase in secessionist sentiments in recent years. While the past inclination toward independence has been centered on economic autonomy and cultural identity, there has been a recent emphasis on political independence, particularly in the times of crisis. In this thesis. I analyze the relationship between the economic changes during the period of a crisis and the public opinion about the potential Catalan secession. Specifically, it investigates the relationships between the economic change and public sentiment during the financial crisis of 2008, the political crisis of 2017, and the pandemic crisis of …

Legalized Same-Sex Marriage And Coming Out In America: Evidence From Catholic Seminaries, Avner Seror, Rohit Ticku

ESI Working Papers

We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests' vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differences-in-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to …

How College Enrollment Changed For Kalamazoo Promise Students Between Fall 2019 And Fall 2020, Daniel Collier, Isabel Mcmullen, Brad J. Hershbein

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

The COVID-19 pandemic greatly reduced the college enrollment rate for students during the Fall 2020 semester. National data show that although enrollment of new students declined overall, it varied substantially by institution type and student characteristics. What national data do not reveal is how certain communities with already high college-going rates responded to the pandemic. We use data from Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) and the tuition-free program the Kalamazoo Promise to compare the immediate college enrollment of graduating high school students from the class of 2019 to that of the class of 2020. Overall, immediate college enrollment of KPS graduates …

Pregnancy Loss And Female Labor Market Outcomes, Priti Kalsi, Maggie Y. Liu

Economics: Faculty Publications

As many as 20% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage - a random event that any expecting woman is susceptible to, yet the economic effects of this prevalent fertility shock have not been directly studied. In this paper, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and address a critical empirical question: how do miscarriages affect women's labor market outcomes, such as income and labor supply? We find that a miscarriage is associated with about $2,500 loss in annual income post-loss. Our findings suggest the negative effect on female labor market outcomes associated with a …

Assessing The Patient-Perceived Monetary Value Of Patient-Reported Outcome Improvement For Patients With Chronic Knee Conditions, Sarah B. Floyd, Alicia Oostdyk, Melanie Cozad, John M. Brooks, Paul Siffri, Brian Burnikel

Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews

Purpose: The high cost of orthopaedic care has attracted criticism in the current value-based health care environment. The objective of this work was to assess the properties of a willingness to pay (WTP)-based approach to estimate the monetary value that patients place on health improvements in chronic knee conditions following orthopaedic treatment.

Methods: A sample of patients with a chronic knee condition were surveyed between January and May of 2018 at a large orthopaedic practice. Each patient provided their WTP for restoration to ideal knee health and completed the Single Assessment Numerical Evaluation (SANE) to describe their baseline knee state. …

Pandemic Emotions: The Good, The Bad, And The Unconscious —Implications For Public Health, Financial Economics, Law, And Leadership, Peter H. Huang

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Pandemics lead to emotions that can be good, bad, and unconscious. This Article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how emotions during pandemics affect people’s responses to pandemics, public health, financial economics, law, and leadership. Pandemics are heart-breaking health crises. Crises produce emotions that impact decision-making. This Article analyzes how fear and anger over COVID-19 fueled anti-Asian and anti-Asian American hatred and racism. COVID-19 caused massive tragic economic, emotional, mental, physical, and psychological suffering. These difficulties are interconnected and lead to vicious cycles. Fear distorts people’s decision readiness, deliberation, information acquisition, risk perception, and thinking. Distortions affect people’s financial, health, and …

Lessons Learned: Sarah Dahlgren, Alec Buchholtz, Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

Sarah Dahlgren was the Executive Vice President and head of the Financial Institution Supervision Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) during the crisis and instrumental in the rescue of American International Group (AIG). This Lessons Learned summary is drawn from a March 22, 2018, interview in which she gave her take on how central bankers can prepare for future crises.

The Rescue Of Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac – Module E: The Housing And Economic Recovery Act Of 2008, Daniel Thompson

Journal of Financial Crises

As the U.S. housing crisis worsened in 2007, and through 2008, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) headed towards insolvency. At the same time, contractions in private securitization resulted in these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) purchasing nearly half of all new mortgages. In July, the government passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) to provide a more effective regulator and to address public uncertainty regarding whether the government would back the GSEs’ assets and liabilities. HERA provided Treasury and the newly formed Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) …

Automation Anxieties: Perceptions About Technological Automation And The Future Of Pharmacy Work, Cameron W. Piercy, Angela N. Gist-Mackey

Human-Machine Communication

This study uses a sample of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians (N = 240) who differ in skill, education, and income to replicate and extend past findings about socioeconomic disparities in the perceptions of automation. Specifically, this study applies the skills-biased technical change hypothesis, an economic theory that low-skill jobs are the most likely to be affected by increased automation (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2019), to the mental models of pharmacy workers. We formalize the hypothesis that anxiety about automation leads to perceptions that jobs will change in the future and automation will increase. We also posit anxiety about overpayment related to …

Measuring The U.S. Employment Situation Using Online Panels: The Yale Labor Survey, Christopher Foote, Tyler Hounshell, William D. Nordhaus, Douglas Rivers, Pamela Torola

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This study presents the design and results of a rapid-fire survey that collects labor market data for individuals in the United States. The purpose is to test online panels for their application to social, economic, and demographic information as well as to apply this approach to the U.S. labor market. The Yale Labor Survey (YLS) used an online panel from YouGov to replicate statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the government’s official source of household labor market statistics. The YLS’s advantages included its timeliness, low cost, and ability to develop new questions quickly to study unusual labor market patterns …

Curse Of Democracy: Evidence From 2020, Yusuke Narita, Ayumi Sudo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Countries with more democratic political regimes experienced greater GDP loss and more deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. Using five different instrumental variable strategies, we find that democracy is a major cause of the wealth and health losses. This impact is global and is not driven by China and the US alone. A key channel for democracy’s negative impact is weaker and narrower containment policies at the beginning of the outbreak, not the speed of introducing policies.

America's Best Cities: Mountain West Cities, Katie M. Gilbertson, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr., Fatma Nasoz

Cities & Metros

This fact sheet reports the rankings of Mountain West cities, based on perceived desirability for living, visiting, and investment. Resonance Consultancy’s “America’s Best Cities 2020,” report examines the nation’s largest cities on six key metrics: “Place,” “Prosperity,” “People,” “Product,” “Programming” and “Promotion.” Nine Mountain West cities are ranked within the top 100 in the United States.

Trade And Informality In The Presence Of Labor Market Frictions And Regulations, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Costas Meghir, Gabriel Ulyssea

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects economic outcomes in the presence of informality. We show the following: 1) Trade openness unambiguously decreases informality in the tradable sector but has ambiguous effects on aggregate informality. 2) The productivity gains from trade are understated when the informal sector is omitted. 3) Trade openness results in large welfare gains even when informality is repressed. 4) …

Investigating The Economic Effects Of Food Affordability, Food Access, And Education On Obesity Rates In Mississippi Counties, Youssef Osman

Honors Theses

The growing rate of obesity across the United States is a topic of great concern considering both the health and financial costs associated with the disease. Many researchers have sought to determine the major causes of obesity so that policy suggestions can be made to reduce its occurrence. Some of the referenced drivers of obesity include high food costs, poor access to healthy food, and a lack of knowledge regarding nutrition. This thesis seeks to find the effects of county-level food prices, income, food access, and education level on obesity rates in Mississippi counties. The analysis uses cross-sectional data from …

An Investigation Of Health Insurance Policy And Behavior In A Virtual Environment, J. Dustin Tracy, Kevin A. James, Hillard Kaplan, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

We introduce a new experimental approach to measuring the effects of health insurance policy alternatives on behavior and health outcomes over the life course. In a virtual environment with multi-period lives, subjects earn virtual income and allocate spending, to maximize utility, which is converted into cash payment. We compare behavior across age, income and insurance plans—one priced according to an individual’s expected cost and the other uniformly priced through employer-implemented cost sharing. We find that 1) subjects in the employer-implemented plan purchased insurance at higher rates; 2) the employer-based plan reduced differences due to income and age; 3) subjects in …

Covid-19’S Impacts On The Labor Market In 2020, Brad J. Hershbein, Harry J. Holzer

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Energy Mix And Climate Change In Pakistan, Syed Murtaza Nadeem

CBER Conference

No abstract provided.

Distributional Impacts Of Retail Vaccine Availability, Judith A. Chevalier, Jason L. Schwartz, Yihua Su, Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We examine the potential for exploiting retailer location choice in targeting health interventions. Using geospatial data, we quantify proximity to vaccines created by a U.S. federal program distributing COVID-19 vaccines to commercial retail pharmacies. We assess the distributional impacts of a proposal to provide vaccines at Dollar General, a low-priced general merchandise retailer. Adding Dollar General to the federal program would substantially decrease the distance to vaccine sites for low-income, rural, and minority U.S. households, groups for which COVID-19 vaccine take-up has been disproportionately slow.

Bedford County Economic Needs Assessment, Dennis Burnside, Jim Robey, Brian Pittelko

Reports

Bedford County Development Association (BCDA) engaged Juniper Solutions (“Juniper”) and The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research (“Upjohn”), collectively the “Team,” to study the current economic conditions of Bedford County to assess potential opportunities from a workforce development and commercial real estate perspective. As part of this effort, the initial process entailed creating a baseline assessment leveraging a multitude of data sources, ranging from U.S. Census Bureau to subscription-based platforms like CoStar for commercial real estate and BurningGlass for job posting metrics. During the quantitative data collection, the the Team also met with stakeholders including public officials, County administrators, real …

An Ethnological Analysis Of The Influence Of Mobile Money On Financial Inclusion: The Case Of Urban Zambia, Edna Kabala, Rosemary Mapoma, Chitimba Nalutongwe, Diana Muyani, John Lungu

Zambia Social Science Journal

The issue of access to financial products has been a public policy issue since 2005 when the first FinScope Zambia study was conducted. The 2015 study indicated that 40.7% of adults were financially excluded. This article investigates the influence of mobile money on financial inclusion using urban Kitwe and Kalulushi as case studies. We employ an ethnographic methodology to understand the extent to which mobile money has encouraged the unbanked population to access financial products and services. The findings indicate that mobile money has a positive influence on financial inclusion. It is easier to open accounts with mobile money kiosks …

Huntington Area Economic Outlook: 2021-2025, John Deskins, Brian Lego

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

The Huntington Area’s1 economy failed to gain any traction during the 2010s, recording no measurable job over the course of the decade. Unfortunately, the region’s economy was dealt another blow by the COVID-19 recession in early-2020.

Affordable Care Act Insurance Coverage Gains In The Midwest: Evidence From The Dependent Coverage Provision, Sarah Herz

Major Themes in Economics

This paper analyzes how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Dependent Coverage Provision affected insurance coverage in the Midwestern region. The Dependent Coverage Provision allows individuals ages 19 to 25 to remain as dependents on parental health insurance plans. This provision was implemented to decrease the number of young adults who were uninsured. Using data from the American Community Survey spanning the years 2008-2013 and estimating difference-in-differences models, I test the impact of the policy implementation on health insurance coverage among a sample of Midwestern young adults. Under my preferred specification, which includes two-way fixed effects and controls for observable characteristics, …

Designing Promise Programs: Decisions And Effects, Shay Slifka

Major Themes in Economics

Having gained popularity over the past two decades, promise programs are a relatively new policy tool aimed at increasing the number of people who earn two-year and four-year postsecondary educational degrees by providing partial or full financial aid. In contrast to other forms of financial aid for postsecondary education, promise programs guarantee funding to students of a specified geographic area, which is sometimes accompanied by merit or need-based requirements. Promise programs differ in design, vary in result, and potentially cause substitution and migration effects. By analyzing several mature promise programs, I identify three fundamental design decisions that policymakers must consider …