Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Survey Of The Labor Market For New Ph.D. Hires In Economics 2024-2025, Kashfia Kamal, Mervin Jebaraj, Raja Kali

Labor Market Survey

This year, the survey questionnaire was sent to 549 organizations. Questionnaires were returned by 136 organizations (24.8 percent). Of this year’s responses, 80 (58.8 percent) were from those who responded to the last survey conducted for the 2023-24 academic year. Among the academic institutions responding, the distribution of highest degrees offered was as follows: Ph.D.—44.9 percent; Master’s—8.1 percent and Bachelor’s—45.6 percent.

The responses are reported for all respondents, and separately for Ph.D. Degree granting institutions and for schools whose highest degree offered is the Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree. Data for the top 30 institutions in the revised National Research Council’s …

U.S. Online Romance Scams: A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Factors Associated With Victimization And Exploration Of Lived Experiences Of Victimization, Rebecca A. Cole

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

The objective of this dissertation is to understand develop an understanding of experiences of online romance scam¹(ORS) victimization and to examine factors associated with ORS victimization. The dissertation samples ORS victims and uses purposive sampling strategies to recruit participants. The research used a mixed methods explanatory design approach. Inclusion criteria included ORS victims 18 and older who lived in the U.S., lost any amount of money in ORS scam, and met the scammer on any Internet platform. Three research manuscripts complete this dissertation. The first manuscript is a scoping review to understand the mental and physical health outcomes …

A 3-Step, Open-Data, Ride-Hailing Ridership Model With Pricing Applications, Richard A. Mucci

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Researchers and practitioners studied the effects ride-hailing had in cities before the covid-19 pandemic. Previous research found ride-hailing to produce negative externalities, such as reducing transit ridership and increasing congestion in various cities. Since the pandemic, ride-hailing ridership has nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels in Chicago. Ride-hailing ridership has grown steadily since the pandemic while a rider’s willingness to share their trip stagnated. Ride-hailing ridership nearly recovering to pre-covid levels in Chicago suggests that transportation planners, and policy makers, will need to continue assessing the impacts ride-hailing trips have in their cities.

Pickup and drop off locations in the Chicago …

Comparing Generative Ai, Keyword Searchers, And Hiring Committees In Selecting Semi-Finalist Job Candidates In Academia, Sarah Snyder

Honors Theses

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of AI tools and keyword searchers in candidate evaluation. The first study examined the use of ChatGPT-4 and a traditional hiring committee in selecting a semifinalist pool for an Assistant Professor of Economics position. It was found that ChatGPT-4's selections were non-replicable, producing different semifinalist lists with each run, indicating significant variability and lack of reliability compared to human committees. The second study focused on predicting self-reported conscientiousness from resumes using both keyword searchers and ChatGPT-4. The results showed that neither method could accurately predict conscientiousness. Similarly, ChatGPT-4's selections were non-replicable, producing …

Which Side (Of The Balance Sheet) Are You On? Household Financial Resources And Participation In The 2020 Protests, Selina Miller, Stephen Roll, C.Taylor Brown, Laura Brugger, Michal Grinstein-Weiss

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The summer of 2020 was marked by widespread protests. Though research has often examined the predictors of protest participation, there exists little work examining the relationship between different types of wealth and protesting. Drawing on resource-based theories of protest participation and asset-based theories of civic engagement, we constructed regression models disentangling relationships between income, liquid assets, investment assets, homeownership, and protesting. Using a national survey administered during the protests, we find that liquid assets are negatively associated, homeownership is positively associated, and investment assets exhibit a non-linear association with protesting. These relationships hold when controlling for income, demographics, and ideology, …

Developing Countries And External Debt: What Is Wrong?, Jesus Felipe, Jose Antonio Perez Montiel

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

LAST DECEMBER, the World Bank published its annual report on international debt (https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/debt-statistics/idr/products). The report indicates that, in 2022, the developing countries spent $443 billion on debt-service repayment (principal plus interest) of their external public and publicly guaranteed debt, 5% more than in 2021. These payments are expected to rise in 2023 and 2024 due to the increase in interest rates. The report indicates that debt levels and high interest rates have set many countries on a path to crisis.

Aligning Eye Care Provider Beliefs With Behaviors: Exploring And Improving Ocular Surface Disease Decision-Making In A Cataract Surgery Clinic, Amy Hellem

Communication (PhD) Dissertations

Millions of cataract surgeries are performed every year in the United States, yet both surgeon reports and patient reports indicate that practices are not utilizing the diagnostic tests and treatments that are advocated in the medical literature to identify and manage ocular surface disease prior to surgery. As a result, patients risk suffering several significant consequences with regard to their vision, comfort and safety. Personal observations from my 25 years of experience working with ophthalmologists and optometrists led to curiosity regarding the root cause of undertreatment of ocular surface disease. Specifically, I had the impression that eye care providers held …

Happy Teams: Utilizing Remote Data Entry Work To Understand The Relationship Between Team Gender Composition, Team Performance, And Worker Satisfaction, Laura Zimmer

CMC Senior Theses

The following study contributes to existing scholarship surrounding the relationship between gender and teamwork. My experiment aims to build on how gender impacts team members' success, emotions, and overall experience by randomly pairing individuals in two-person remote teams, to complete data entry tasks together. Teams work together remotely to complete tasks rating Chicago roads. Pre and post-teamwork surveys were completed by individuals surrounding their emotions and experience working with their partner. My results demonstrate that single-gender female teams report the highest increases in happiness while working in teams. Individuals were found to rate partners of their same gender more highly …

Mental Imagery Contributes To Loss Aversion By Amplifying Negative Emotions, Daniel Kroshchuk

CMC Senior Theses

Defined as the experience of sensory information without the presence of external stimuli, mental imagery is thought to play a role in memory, emotional regulation, and decision-making. Recent studies suggest that mental imagery varies widely across the general population, with approximately 2-4% of individuals having a reduction or complete absence of visual imagination, a phenomenon known as aphantasia. Individuals with aphantasia show reduced emotional arousal to fear-inducing imagery, raising the question of how variation in imagery affects cognitive processes that are influenced by emotion. Specifically, in economic decision-making it has been shown that the prospect of loss triggers negative emotions, …

Abmscore: A Heuristic Algorithm For Forming Strategic Coalitions In Agent-Based Simulation, Andrew J. Collins, Gayane Grigoryan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Integrating human behavior into agent-based models has been challenging due to its diversity. An example is strategic coalition formation, which occurs when an individual decides to collaborate with others because it strategically benefits them, thereby increasing the expected utility of the situation. An algorithm called ABMSCORE was developed to help model strategic coalition formation in agent-based models. The ABMSCORE algorithm employs hedonic games from cooperative game theory and has been applied to various situations, including refugee egress and smallholder farming cooperatives. This paper discusses ABMSCORE, including its mechanism, requirements, limitations, and application. To demonstrate the potential of ABMSCORE, a new …

Improving American Men's Quality Of Life By Economically Empowering American Women, Margot Rosenblatt

Scripps Senior Theses

In this paper, I explore the relationship between women’s economic empowerment and men’s quality of life in the United States. I created an index of women’s economic empowerment based on county-level data on labor force participation rates, rates of pay, teen birth rates, and families in which a woman is the primary income earner. I then created an index of men’s quality of life based on financial, physical, and mental health indicators. Adjusting for income, dominant industry type, age, population density, race variables, and environmental factors, I found a statistically significant positive correlation between women’s economic empowerment and men’s quality …

Catching Up To Yesterday: An Argument For A Practical Application Of Creativity For Inspiring Change From A Content-Based Course Delivery To A 21st-Century Skills-Based Delivery, Darren Chapman

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project is a creative vision for how college-level courses could be changed to deliver the most important skills students need in the 21st century—moving toward an essential employability skills-based delivery process while training vocational (content) skills. Technology is outpacing humans' ability to adapt and adopt to it, making it increasingly difficult to keep pace with technological change. This has wide-ranging effects on each of us – productively, emotionally, and perhaps physically. Colleges are at the forefront of educating citizens about the working world to improve their productivity, incomes and their sense of intrinsic motivation. However, these same colleges are …

Do The Securities Laws Actually Protect Investors (And How)? Lessons From Spacs, Patrick M. Corrigan

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Article identifies transactional innovation in public offering markets as a case study of how going-public transactions would work if issuers could choose to relax some of the investor protections provided under the securities laws. In recent years, private companies that wanted to go public had a meaningful choice between a traditional initial public offering and a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC). Most of the direct and indirect investor protections that ordinarily apply in the initial public offering context are relaxed in the SPAC context.

The Article argues that outcomes in SPAC markets, where …

The Effect Of Remittances On Housing Expenditure In Filipino Households, Joaquin Franco Rigonan, Angelo Salvo, Lawrence B. Dacuycuy, Tereso S. Tullao Jr, Winfred Villamil, Krista Yu

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) have chosen to work abroad due to the abundance of better work opportunities and a higher salary earned. Migrant workers send remittances to their families from their country of origin to bring extra income for these households to spend on essential consumption. These remittances serve as additional income and protection for recipient households, easing their consumption and enabling them to spend their money on education, housing construction, and household electrical appliances. Numerous existing literature has stated that household-receiving remittances spend more money on investments that will help improve their standard of living; one of these investments …

The Influence Of Flavor On The Abuse Liability Of A Heated Tobacco Product And Its Feasibility As A Menthol Cigarette Substitute, Augustus White

Theses and Dissertations

Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs) purport to expose people that use cigarettes to fewer of the harmful or potentially harmful constituents of tobacco while still delivering reinforcing amounts of nicotine (Auer, Concha-Lozano et al., 2017). An exemplar of the HTP class, IQOS, and its three varieties of “HeatSticks” have been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as “Modified Risk Tobacco Products” (MRTP). However, as the FDA is planning to ban menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes, questions remain regarding whether characterizing flavors should be permitted in HTPs (FDA, 2022e). New evidence regarding HTP abuse liability (i.e., the likelihood …

Compassion Cartography: Mapping The Psychological Landscape Of Altruistic Equity And Effectiveness, Kyle Fiore Law

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Psychologists and philosophers have often championed deliberative reasoning over empathy as a better approach to overcoming parochial biases and guiding altruistic equity and effectiveness. Advocates of the effective altruism (EA) philosophy even advise philanthropists to downregulate empathic responses to maximize the impact of their donations. However, recent research reveals that extraordinary altruists (XAs), such as those who donate organs to strangers, are driven primarily by empathy. This dissertation explores whether empathy necessarily impedes altruistic equity (impartial regard for others’ welfare) and effectiveness (prioritizing impact), revealing a more nuanced reality that challenges this perspective. Across two phases of research involving three …

Statistical Discrimination And Duration Dependence In A Semistructural Model, Ismail Baydur, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article develops a job-search model with unobserved worker heterogeneity and learning about worker types from unemployment duration. The model features negative duration dependence that stems from unobserved heterogeneity, skill depreciation, and statistical discrimination. We estimate job-finding rates implied by our model using microlevel data from the Current Population Survey. We find that removing interview costs counterfactually, thereby eliminating statistical discrimination, substantially increases the job-finding rates of the long-term unemployed. The performance of low-skill workers at the interview stage with discriminating firms plays a key role in explaining our counterfactual result.

An Investigation Of Bidder Behaviour In Wic Infant Formula Rebate Auctions, Ashma Pandey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated the competitive bidding dynamics for infant formula rebate contracts within the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). I begin by focusing on the differences between winning and losing bids. The study employs multiple regression to predict rebate bids submitted by major manufacturers when they win a contract. I next conduct a paired t-test for each manufacturer – revealing statistically significant differences between predicted bids (based on the parameters from the winning model) and actual bids when a manufacturer did not win. This suggests that each manufacturer bids significantly lower rebates (higher net …

Between The Entrepreneurial Impetus For Higher Profits And Consumer Rights Or Types Of Unfair And Misleading Commercial Practices: Insights From Bulgaria, Silviya Atanasova Topleva

International Journal on Consumer Law and Practice

The application of unfair misleading commercial practices affects the economic interests of consumers, threatening legal security and the achievement of market equilibrium. In response to these imbalances, the law builds a solid regulatory network for consumer protection. In the codification of the protection of consumer interests from unfair commercial practices, an important place is occupied by secondary legislation of the EU, and in particular Directive 2005/29/EC concerning unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices in the internal market. The article presents a classification of the types of unfair misleading commercial practices based on the regulatory framework at the European and national level. The …

Social Welfare Functions And Health Policy: A New Approach, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

The social welfare function (SWF) framework converts the possible outcomes of governmental policy choice into vectors (lists) of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, measuring the lifetime well-being of each individual in the population of interest. The SWF proper is a rule for ranking these vectors. The utilitarian SWF adds up well-being numbers. A prioritarian SWF adds up well-being numbers plugged into a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation function. Governmental policies are conceptualized as probability distributions over well-being vectors. A recent literature applies the SWF framework to health policy. This article first provides a brief overview of the SWF framework and …