Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mutual Aid: A Community-Led Solution To Economic Hardships At The University Of Maine, Tamra Benson

Honors College

Economic inequality and hardships are common issues on college campuses, for both students and employees. Mutual aid is the act of giving and receiving aid within a community where those who have extra resources may give to those who lack them, to build community care and resilience in the face of hardships. Many college campuses have established mutual aid funds to provide a safety net for those who are left behind by standard assistance programs. These funds can have several structures, so conducting research is essential before deciding on a model. The goal of this project was to design a …

Citizen Perceptions Of The Sustainability Of Marine Aquaculture, Bruce Wyatt

Honors College

As the world confronts the need for sustainable food systems, marine aquaculture serves as a key opportunity to produce safe, sustainable seafood. However, marine aquaculture still faces social resistance to its adoption with environmental and economic concerns leading to citizen and consumer hesitations regarding the industry and its products. In this study, we explore factors that lead to a citizen holding primarily positive or negative views of marine aquaculture with a focus on whether these views are driven by environmental or economic perceptions. Using a survey of Maine coastal residents (n=295), we find that individuals whose use of the Maine …

Effects Of The Transportation And Climate Initiative On The Maine Economy: An Analysis Of Cap-And-Invest And Its Heterogeneous Impacts On Rural And Urban Households, William L. Somes

Honors College

In December 2020, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was released by the Transportation and Climate Initiative Program (TCI-P), a collaboration of 13 jurisdictions in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. Modeled on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the TCI-P follows a cap-and-invest framework to reduce emissions from the transportation sector by 26% from 2022 to 2032. Since the TCI-P is expected to raise the price of gasoline by 5¢ to 9¢ per gallon, there has been concern that some populations may be disproportionately affected. The present research studies the potential heterogeneous impacts of the TCI-P …

Participation In The Belt And Road Initiative: Who Joins And Why?, Patrick Groening

Honors College

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a large-scale, global infrastructure project introduced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The primary goal is to invest in infrastructure projects across Eurasia and Africa in an effort to improve regional connectivity. This research explains who participates in the BRI through cross-country quantitative analysis and two in-depth qualitative case studies. Through a logit analysis of political economy factors such as GDP per capita, FDI inflows, aid data, and others, I find that economic need is a significant predictor of membership as well as previous involvement in Chinese organizations such as the AIIB. …

Inpatient Mental Health Services In Rural Hospitals Of The United States And Canada: A Case Study Of Maine And New Brunswick, Dominic Gayton

Honors College

An important resource for mental health patients is their nearest hospital, and this is especially true in rural regions where outpatient mental health services may be lacking. In the United States, policies are in place which limit the ability of small, rural hospitals to provide inpatient psychiatric services cost effectively, leading many hospitals to forgo offering the services at all. This project compares the situation in the United States with that of Canada—where similar policies are not present under a vastly different healthcare system—to see if inpatient psychiatric services are more or less prevalent in rural Canadian hospitals and whether …

The Fiscal Effects Of Public Investment In College Education, Jacob Spaulding

Honors College

This paper quantifies the fiscal impacts that increasing levels of college educational attainment has on the tax revenues received by and the expenditures of governments at all levels: federal, state, and local. College graduates prove to be more fiscally valuable citizens than non-college graduates to society. They generate more in taxable income for the government, and they rely less upon a range of public assistance programs. The average college degree generates approximately $361,115 in total federal taxes in present value, and $182,795 in total state and local taxes in present value. The average college degree results in a reduction of …

Exploring The Economic Resilience In The United States Through State Gdp Output, Mariya Pominova

Honors College

Economic resilience is a rising topic in the field of economics. Although there is no standard definition, most literature suggests that the concept of regional economic resilience converged to encapsulate a region’s ability to resist, recover from, and restructure itself after an economic or environmental shock. There are a multitude of methods in the literature used to measure economic resilience. All of these methods utilize either GDP, employment, or a combination of both. While both GDP and employment cycles are powerful tools for measuring the impact of a recession on an economy, they measure vastly different things and neither fully …

Forecasting Labor Force Participation At The Regional Level In The United States: The Case Of Maine, Maryam Kashkooli

Honors College

This project attempts to investigate the future of labor force participation in Maine using an econometric forecasting approach. Forecasting has become an increasingly popular form of statistical analysis which uses historical distributions to help estimate future distributions of econometric models. There exists extensive literature on forecasting employment, however the literature on forecasting labor force participation is relatively small. I adapt existing econometric models and make use of time series information on sociodemographic factors such as age and net migration in order to determine how Maine’s changing demographic structure is affecting its labor force and how these effects will carry on …

The Underrepresentation Of Racial And Ethnic Minorities In Legal Occupations, Maria Beaulieu

Honors College

For the purpose of this research, minorities are defined as both racial and ethnic categories that are numerically inferior than the majority racial or ethnic group. Historical social inferiority is an arguable consequence of numerical inferiority, but is not included in this research’s definition of a minority. In this research, we see how women are numerically inferior in certain legal occupations, however gender/sex is also incorporated within the broader category of racial and ethnic minorities.

Current literature utilizing census bureau data, goes into some detail about the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority lawyers. However, this research project reaches greater …

The Impact Of Active And Passive Ownership On Total Shareholder Return And Environmental, Social, And Governance Performance Of Companies, Abigail J. Bennett

Honors College

The purpose of this study was to test the impact of passive and active ownership on total shareholder return (TSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score of firms. The motivation behind the study is the rise in passive investing over the last few decades and the concern that passive owners are not able to engage sufficiently with management of the companies they are invested in.

This study hypothesized that firms that are actively controlled have high TSR and higher ESG scores than firms that are passively controlled. The hypothesis was supported by the reasoning that passive owners lack the …

Constructing Identity Through The Lens Of Fashion: An Honors Thesis, Cara P. Doiron

Honors College

Fashion is an artistic decision that every person makes every day. Even those who say they don’t care about clothing are still portraying something about themselves to the outside world with the stylistic choices they make. This creative Honors Thesis explores the impact of fashion on self-representation, accomplished through the design and construction of a capsule wardrobe line of clothing. Due to the project’s personal and introspective nature, the intended wearer is the artist, and therefore the pieces are specifically tailored to her, rather than the straight sized garments that are typically produced in the fashion industry. This line consists …

The Analysis Of Labor Market Efficiency: A Comparative Analysis Of Maine And The United States, Sarah M. Welch

Honors College

The purpose of this research is to analyze the change in the labor market efficiency from before to after the great recession and its effect on economic output following the recession. Concerns have been raised about the adjustment of the labor market compared to the recovery of other economic indicators. Influenced by the methods of Blanchard and Diamond (1989) and Dixon et al. (2014), the Beveridge curve and matching function are used to estimate and observe changing labor market dynamics through the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies.

This thesis finds that labor markets for both Maine and the United …

An Agent-Based Model Of Urban Sprawl: York And Cumberland Counties, Maine, Kaitlyn G. Lavallee

Honors College

Urban sprawl is defined as the movement of populations towards the fringes of urban centers, leading to the conversion of rural land to suburban consumption. This expansion in the distribution of populations has many implications for local and state policymakers, business owners and consumers. In Maine, sprawl is particularly prevalent in Cumberland County and York County, where the state’s population is the densest. The objective of this paper is to develop an agent-based model (ABM), which attempts to reflect the movement of households within these counties. These households make decisions sourced in microeconomic theory that are built into the model. …

The Economic And Psychological Metrics Of Political Decision-Making, Allyson Eslin

Honors College

This project investigates what economic and psychological attributes influence Maine voters in their political decision-making. I examine how two typically separate disciplines—economics and psychology—combine, in order to understand unique characteristics that inform a voter’s political decision-making. This knowledge is vital to the legislators who seek to understand and represent the people who elected them. I examine the impact of economic stress on important political attitudes, a metric that has never been used to examine Maine voters. To gather this data, approximately 2,000 Maine residents were surveyed in 2013 using a questionnaire delivered through the mail. Using inferential statistics and regression …

Effects Of Climate Change On The Maine Lobster Industry, Abigail Sennick

Honors College

Climate change is affecting many industries in Maine and all over the world, but this research aims to highlight the effects of climate change on Maine’s lobster industry. Data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources allow for analysis of landings, price per pound, and real value between 2004 and 2015. The ideal model would include proxies for fishing effort, natural cycles of species, commercial fishing laws, management changes, temperature, weather severity, salinity changes, social hierarchy changes etc. Due to data limitations, the quantitative research question is: do increasing water temperatures have a negative effect on the lobster industry? There …

An Analysis Of The Maine Solid Waste Management Hierarchy And Recommendation For Future Implementation, Jaime Steven

Honors College

The current Solid Waste Management Hierarchy does not adequately deter land disposal of waste in Maine. In this paper, I analyze the Maine State Solid Waste Management Hierarchy as it reads in Title 38 M.R.S.A. § 2101, found in Appendix B. The purpose of this paper is to address the hierarchy’s issues, as well as to offer additions to the hierarchy that will help in its goal of reducing solid waste landfilled. In this paper I analyze the original intentions of the hierarchy when it was enacted, and addresses the faults within the hierarchy that do not aid these intentions …

The Economics Of Offshore Wind Energy, Caitlin M. Howland

Honors College

The global community is yearning for a solution to climate change. Research has shown one cause of climate change could be emissions from electricity production by fossil fuel sources. Deepwater offshore wind energy is being looked into as a potential solution, and with every new endeavor a cost analysis is necessary.

To conduct this study I reviewed reports, articles, and papers by economists, potential developers, and by research institutions and universities. I took this information and applied it to my own calculations on the cost of hypothetical deepwater offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine. I found it important …