Digital Commons Network^™

Voting Behavior Among Young Adults: An Analysis Of Youth Voters And How Behavioral Economic Concepts Can Be Applied To Increase Young Voter Turnout, Heather Hall

Honors College Theses

No abstract provided.

Drinking Water Quality Impacts On Health Care Expenditures In The United States, Fahad Alzahrani, Alan R. Collins, Elham Erfanian

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

This paper explores the relationship between episodes of contaminated drinking water and health care expenditures in the United States. The analysis relies on panel data from the 48 contiguous states from 2000 to 2011. We use the population served by public water systems that violate health-based standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act as a proxy for contaminated drinking water. We estimate spatial and non-spatial models and control for factors that may affect per capita health care expenditures including variables that reflect air quality violations along with ability to pay plus demand for and supply of health care services. The …

Sanitation, Ek Prem Katha: The Impact Of Sanitation On Education In Indian Government Schools, Romanshi Gupta

Scripps Senior Theses

The Total Sanitation Campaign is an initiative launched by the Government of India in 1999 to accelerate sanitation coverage throughout the country. This thesis measures the impact of the Total Sanitation Campaign on education in Indian government schools. I assess whether access to toilets, access to water or access to both toilets and water impact the following parameters of education: literacy, current enrollment in school or completed years of education. Data is sourced from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, sorted for the nineteen major states in India and aggregated at a district level for each state. The analysis …

To What Extent Do Religious Institutions Provide A Societal Value? Is The Tax-Exempt Status Justified?, Annabel Hou

Scripps Senior Theses

Religious institutions have been tax-exempt from almost all taxes for more than two centuries. The two primary justifications used to protect this ‘status’ is the constitution and the concept that churches provide positive externalities that believers and non-believers all benefit from. This paper examines the relationship between religiosity and five socially important characteristics: high school graduation rate, a divorce rate, incidence of domestic violence, and levels of substance abuse and crime. I run multiple simple and full regressions across 207 counties in Texas. In four of the five analyses, religiosity has a strong statistically significant desirable impact. With the addition …

Measuring The Economic Costs Of Workplace Sexual Harassment On Women, Maureen R. Cowhey

Scripps Senior Theses

Workplace sexual harassment costs the government and companies millions of dollars a year. Women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace suffer from negative mental and physical health problems, lower career attainment, decreased productivity, and a higher rate of job turnover. Sexual harassment is both costly and unjust, however the exact cost to women who experience sexual harassment is unknown. This thesis will measure the impact of workplace sexual harassment on wages in different industries. Using data on claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I calculate and analyze the impact of sexual harassment on wages, age, sex, and …

Examining The Role Of Intra-Household Bargaining In The Adoption Of Green Technology, Antara Anand

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper investigates factors that affect gender-based differences in intra-household bargaining power that are reflected in consumption decisions regarding the adoption of green technology. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey-II and a probit regression analysis, I find that increasing the level of a woman’s education (a proxy for increasing bargaining power) increases the likelihood of her household adopting LPG, the cleanest fuel option available. I also create an experimental design to serve as a next step for future research and target data collection on individual-level factors and environmental outcomes. The setup is for a potential intervention that assesses …

Economics Impacts Of Genetically Modified Organisms: An Analysis Of Bt Cotton In India, Joseph Lahorgue

CMC Senior Theses

The emergence of genetically modified organisms has sparked a multi-faceted debate, covering issues related to human health, ethics, and the environment. Discussions of the economics of GMO adoption are highly politicized and are influenced by large corporations and non-governmental organizations. This study aims to provide insight into the economic impacts of genetically modified organisms on individual farmers of cotton in India. The first GMO to reach commercialization in India was Bt cotton in 2002, which led to significant increases in revenue and yield among smallholder farmers. Using survey data collected between 2003 and 2009, I examine the economic impacts of …

The Effect Of The Online Experience On Household Consumption Expenditure In The European Union, Mark Gallo

Honors College Theses

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Four-Day School Weeks And Fifth-Day Programs On Delinquency And Problem Behaviors In Adolescents, Emily Collins

Scripps Senior Theses

In recent years, tightening budgets have forced school districts to find new ways to save money. One way that has become increasingly popular is to shorten the traditional five-day school week to only four-days a week. This change is budget friendly and may act through efficiency wage theory as a recruitment tool for better teachers. Despite the increasing prevalence of districts running on four-day weeks, many of the effects of the shorter week on students are still unclear. Utilizing district-level panel data from the Colorado Department of Education, Study One took a difference-in-differences approach to determine the effect of the …

Determinants Of Life Expectancy In The Central African Republic, Taylor Rizzo

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the determinants of life expectancy in the Central African Republic. The study uses economic, social, and environmental factors to estimate a health production function. The study aims to offer suggestions on ways to target life expectancy as a method for increasing economic growth. The results show that the best way to increase longevity in the CAR and solve the mortality crisis are to increase sanitation facilities and regulation, solve the hunger/malnutrition problem, and to reduce the deadly spread of HIV. Aid was determined to be significant in improving the well-being of citizens in the CAR.

Early Childhood Development And The Replication Of Poverty, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Antipoverty efforts must begin early because abundant evidence demonstrates that experiences during the first five years of life lay a foundation for future learning and the acquisition of skills. Public investments can help foster early childhood development, but these efforts must begin early and must involve both parents and children. This chapter describes the patterns of convergence and divergence in state approaches to supporting early childhood development. For the prenatal period until age three, the federal government is the primary source of funds, and there is fairly limited variation in how this money is spent across the states. For the …

Consumer Response To Composite Ratings Of Nursing Home Quality, M. C. Perraillon, R. T. Konetzka, Daifeng He, R. M. Werner

Economics Faculty Works

Health-care report cards are intended to address information asymmetries and enable consumers to choose providers of better quality. However, the form of the information may matter to consumers. Nursing Home Compare, a website that publishes report cards for nursing homes, went from publishing a large set of indicators to a composite rating in which nursing homes are assigned one to five stars. We evaluate whether the simplified ratings motivated consumers to choose better-rated nursing homes. We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate changes in new admissions six months after the publication of the ratings. Our main results show that …

Can Machine Learning On Economic Data Better Forecast The Unemployment Rate?, Aaron S. Kreiner

Honors Papers

This paper examines different machine learning methods to project the U.S. unemployment rate one year ahead. The forecasts include a naive forecast equal to the current unemployment plus the change of unemployment over the last year, along with forecasts from a Lasso regression and a neural network model. The last two models, which can be quickly run using an SQL database, select data from the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED) and are fitted (trained) in-sample from 1970 to 2000 to forecast quarterly unemployment rates over 2001 to 2018. The training window is updated in each forecast quarter to include new …

Which Side Are You On?, Gina Mamone

Exhibit Panels

Which Side Are You On? is a new work by Gina Mamone, co-founder of the West Virginia-based art collective Queer Appalachia. Which Side Are You On? invokes the spirit of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem I Want a President, but speaks with the voice of 2018 rural America.

"I want a survivor for Governor. I want a Governor whose home has been raided by ICE. I want the child of a public school teacher for Governor, and I want someone who knows what days to hit what food pantries. I want a Governor who has had experience heating a home …

Leverage Dan Partisipasi Ekspor: Studi Empiris Pada Perusahaan Manufaktur Di Indonesia, Ilham Perintis, Maddaremmeng A.Panennungi

Jurnal Kebijakan Ekonomi

The study aims to investigate the relationship between leverage on firms' opportunities to participate in export markets at the levels of aggregate sectors and subsectors of manufacturing of Indonesia by using Industry Survey data published by Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS) for the period 2007 - 2015. The results of logistic estimation at the sectoral aggregate level indicate that the higher a firm has the financial capacity to meet obligations or that the company is not burdened by debt arising from the use of leverage, the firms are not financially constrained and have greater opportunity for firms to participate in the …

Water And Life. A Cross-Sectional Study On Determinants Of Beverage Consumption And Water Access In One Tribal Community, Christina White

All Master's Theses

Increasingly, poor diet has been shown to be one of the most crucial factors associated with cause of death, even more critical than smoking. Research in the past two decades has consistently linked increased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) to the obesity epidemic contributing to a public health crisis all over the United States. Native Americans, among other minority groups, suffer obesity disproportionately from the rest of the US population, yet they continually fail to be included in research on the subject. Traditional research methods, sparse care coverage on reservations, consolidation of unique tribes into one classification, and failure to …

Analyzing The Impact Of Home Locales On Access To Tertiary Education; Trends In Students’ Access To Bucknell University, Emily Tevebaugh

Honors Theses

Access to postsecondary education has been found in previous studies to be correlated with socioeconomic status as well as with various other indicators, such as parents’ education levels and cultural expectations. However, addressing the impact of home locales and geographical proximity to colleges in addition to these individual characteristics is a crucial part of understanding college access. In this honors thesis, the following questions will be examined: how has access to college and the decision to matriculate changed in recent years? How does distance from colleges and differing characteristics of home locales influence acceptance to a university and the decision …

The Impact Of Price Level On Cpall Common Stock Price., Nutsupa Chamchuen

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Stock market is an essential sector of the economy of any country. It performs as a leading indicator that represents the whole economic movement. It is also served as the indicator of financial performance of company. The stock price of CPALL is one of commerce stock that investor very interested in, with high growth potential and continuous profit growth. This research represented an explores the importance of Consumer price index (CPI) that influence the CPALL stock price. The data that employed in this study cover the period from 2004 to 2019. The sample consists of 64 observations in form of …

Understanding Factors Of Sexual Behaviors In Teenagers In Mississippi, Jackson Colburn

Honors Theses

The primary purpose of this study is to determine the associations between socio-demographic factors and sexual behaviors in teens based on bivariate analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey for 2015. In conducting a comparative analysis of survey data for both the United States and the state of Mississippi, this study aims to depict a picture of the state of teen sexual behaviors both nationally and in Mississippi. A secondary quantitative analysis of the Mississippi survey dataset also sets out to highlight any possible significant relationships between teen sexual behaviors and certain …

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Livelihood, Environmental And Health Benefits Of A Large Scale, Christina K. Barstow, Randall Bluffstone, Kyle Silon, Karl Linden, Evan Thomas

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Public health interventions targeting contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution may help to reduce two of the leading causes of death among children under 5 in Rwanda - diarrhea and pneumonia. These interventions also have the potential to provide economic benefits, including reduction in expenditures on fuelwood and time spent on fuelwood collection, environmental benefits through reductions in deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, and additional economic benefits attributable to health impacts. We evaluate one such large scale intervention, the Tubeho Neza program in Western Rwanda using a cost-benefit analysis. This paper estimates monetized program benefits related to fuelwood savings, …

Estimating The Present Value Of Carbon Sequestration In U.S. Forests, 2015–2050, For Evaluating Federal Climate Change Mitigation Policies, Robert T. Haight, Randall Bluffstone, Jeffrey D. Kline, John D. Coulston, David N. Wear, Kate Zook

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We demonstrate an application evaluating carbon sequestration benefits from federal policy alternatives. Using detailed forest inventory data, we projected carbon sequestration outcomes in the coterminous 48 states for a baseline scenario and three policy scenarios through 2050. Alternatives included (1) reducing deforestation from development, (2) afforestation in the eastern United States and reforestation in the western United States, and (3) reducing stand-replacing wildfires. We used social cost of carbon estimates to evaluate the present value of carbon sequestration benefits gained with each policy. Results suggest that afforestation and reforestation would provide the greatest marginal increase in carbon benefit, far exceeding …

Three Essays On Applied Semiparametric Methods, Qinling Lu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first chapter studies a varying coefficient panel data model with different smoothing variables and fixed effects using a two-step estimation approach. The first-step pilot estimator is constructed by ap- approximating the varying coefficients with B-spline functions. The pilot estimator is then used to perform a one-step backfitting to obtain the second-step efficient estimator with kernel local linear estimation. The second-step estimator is efficient in the sense of being equivalent to a procedure knowing the other components of the varying coefficient. The asymptotic properties of both the pilot and efficient estimators are obtained. A Monte Carlo simulation indicates that the …

Three Essays On Urban Consumer Service Firms: Evidence From Yelp, Josh Matti

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores questions related to consumer services using Yelp data from the Phoenix area. Chapter 1 explores competition. Competition is a key feature of the market process assumed to improve market outcomes. But how strong is the relationship between competition and positive consumer experiences, and how does the relationship vary across space? This chapter explores these questions by exploiting Yelp data from thousands of restaurants in the Phoenix area. After controlling for restaurant characteristics, census tract level demographics, census tract fixed effects, and sub-industry fixed effects, the results are consistent with spatial competition positively affecting consumer experiences. Chapter 2 …

Three Essays On Utilizing Spatial Econometrics In Natural Resource Economics Related To Water, Health, And Energy, Elham Erfanian

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Spatial interaction and the locational structure between observations have recently gained more attention in the field of econometrics for both cross-sectional and panel data analyses. Compared to a non-spatial economic model, a spatial model relaxes the assumption of independency in observations. This research will apply spatial econometrics modeling in three different fields in applied economics: 1) water charge and minimum monthly access charge in West Virginia municipalities, 2) Naloxone access law and opioid overdose deaths among the U.S. states, and 3) ��2.5 concentrations and asthma hospitalizations in Pennsylvania counties. Based on the nature of water resource imposing spillovers in water …

Differences In Sexual Delay Discounting Among In-Treatment Adults With Opioid Use Disorder, Jonathan J.K. Stoltman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Previous research has found impulsive decision-making to be a core component of addiction (Moody, Franck, Hatz, & Bickel, 2016). One way to measure impulsive choice is through the use of a delay discounting task. The delay discounting task provides a way to measure choice of immediate, smaller rewards compared to delayed, larger rewards (Odum, 2011b). An emerging area of research in addiction science is the intersection of addiction and sexual health. Previous sexual delay discounting research has focused on whether attractiveness or STD risk can shift the likelihood of waiting until a condom was available (Johnson & Bruner, 2012). This …

An Examination Of The Stock Market's Effect On Economic Inequality, Nicholas Golina

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The economic literature on economic inequality has shown that it can negatively impact aggregate demand because it indicates a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 10% as opposed to the poor and middle class, who are more likely to consume. The literature has identified many factors that can lead to increasing inequality. The stock market could be one of those factors since it can either create an upward redistributive effect towards the top 10% or redistributive effect towards the middle class. This paper tested the effect of the stock market on inequality. This study contributes to …

Empirical Study Of Basic Violations, Pay Incentives, And Safety: Evidence From U.S. Intrastate Carriers, Shengyang Ju

Wayne State University Dissertations

Truck drivers are under financial pressure due to inadequacy in their compensation. Thus, they have strong incentives to work more legally or illegally in pursuing a higher income, which leads to fatigue and HOS violations and ultimately causes crashes. On the other hand, FMCSA oversees the motor carrier’s safety performance and tries to improve the current safety measurement since everyone pays a share of the economic costs due to the externality. This dissertation aims to explore the complex relationship between BASICs violations, pay incentives and crashes, to raise the importance of economic impact on carrier’s safety, and to test the …

The Demand And Supply Side Responses To Changes In Health Insurance Status, Naim Chy

Wayne State University Dissertations

We estimate the effects of having health insurance on the probability of facing trouble in accessing provider’s care and that of being refused as a new patient by the provider’s office in chapter 2 of this dissertation. The NHIS data for 2011-2015 are pooled. To fight the potential endogeneity problem arising from the selection bias associated with insurance status we use a 2SLS method with self-employment status of individual and family income as the instruments. The estimated results show that having health insurance reduces the probability of facing difficulty in getting provider’s appointment by 7.3 percentage points. On the other …

Health And Natural Capital In An Augmented Solow Growth Model, Sa-Ad Iddrisu

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explains output growth in nations using two different forms of economic capital (health and natural capital) in separate models under paper 1 and 2. In paper 1, income per worker’s growth in the emerging market economies and developing economies is estimated using health capital. Previous studies done on health capital and output growth have mostly focused on Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and advanced economies, but I focused on emerging market economies and developing economies. I examined the association amongst health capital and economic growth in an augmented Solow Model, using total HEX per capita and …

Medicaid Managed Care And Its Impact On Potentially Preventable Hospital Utilization (Inpatient And Emergency Room Visits), Mohammad Usama Toseef

Wayne State University Dissertations

Introduction: The objective of this study is to compare the performance of Medicaid health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and fee-for-service (FFS) Medicaid regarding the prevalence of potentially preventable hospitalizations and emergency room (ER) visits, a recognized measure of outpatient care quality.

Methods: Nationally representative data on non-institutionalized Medicaid recipients, ages 18-64, from the 2003-2012 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Separate analyses are conducted for recipients insured through both Medicaid and Medicare (“dual eligibles”) and recipients whose only health insurance is Medicaid (“non-duals”). In each group the occurrence of potentially preventable hospital use is measured, and then survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression models are …