Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Preventing Pandemics: Contributing Factors To Susceptibility During The H1n1 Pandemic, Melanie A. Zilora

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This paper uses Poisson and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression techniques on panel data from the United Nations World Health Organization’s FluNet to evaluate factors contributing to a country’s H1N1 influenza (swine flu) pandemic outcomes. Countries with higher development (as measured by gross domestic product and the United Nations Human Development Program’s development index) and higher mean annual temperature (as measured in the capital city) tended to have an earlier first reporting of cases. Though subject to reporting biases, the results also suggest that mass vaccinations have a negative effect on weekly reported cases. Countries that would vaccinate in the …

Connections Between U.S. Consumer Magazine Cover Characteristics And Single Copy Sales Circulation, Stephanie C. Barlow

Honors Capstone Projects - All

In the realm of journalism, conventional wisdom suggests that magazine covers “sell” magazines at newsstands. This study explores this idea by looking at the econometric relationship between cover characteristics such as presence of people and “catch” words and single copy sales. Several significant characteristics influencing such sales are found. In addition, this study is based on a new data set developed by the author indicating various characteristics of numbers of magazine covers over a five-year time span.

Specifically, a set of 14 magazines were observed for 10 characteristics. The percentage of the presence of these characteristics on magazine covers over …