The Fourth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium was held on Friday and Saturday, April 7th – 8th, on the Duke University campus. This year’s Symposium featured twelve papers authored by students from Davidson College, Duke University, and UNC-Chapel Hill, which were presented in three different sessions. As in past years, the papers focused on a wide variety of issues and disciplines in economics, but were uniformly impressive in terms of their creativity and quality. And nearly all of the research papers analyzed important policy issues.

As in past years, international topics remain popular subjects for undergraduate research, with three of the Symposium papers addressing questions in international economics.   Pauline Abetti, for example, used voting models to analyze the motivations behind the Congressional vote on the Central American Free Trade Area, or CAFTA, in a paper entitled “Congressional Voting on DR-CAFTA: A Focus on Environmental Lobbying.” Ethan Fleegler, in “The Twin Deficits Revisited: A Cross-Country, Empirical Approach,” used multicointegration analysis to examine whether the “twin deficits” problem (fiscal deficit and trade deficit) exists in four different countries. And Corinne Low used a microeconomic data set from Senegal to examine the determinants of fertility in a highly religious society, in order to devise an alternative to prevailing contraception-based population policy, in her paper “The Senegalese Experience: Rethinking Fertility Theory for Highly Religious Societies.”

Two papers focused on the effects of excise tax increases. In “The Impact of the North Carolina Cigarette Excise Tax Increase on Cigarette Sales, Cigarette Excise Tax Revenue, and Cigarette Smuggling in North Carolina and Surrounding States,” Robert (Palmer) Steel examined the impacts of the large increase in North Carolina’s cigarette tax, which occurred in late 2005, on cigarette consumption and especially on smugglers’ demand for North Carolina cigarettes. And in “Federal Excise Taxes and the U.S. Beer Industry’s Three-Tier System of Distribution: Do Beer Manufacturers Benefit from Federal Excise Taxes?” Ankur Fadia examined the effects of the 1991 increase in the federal excise tax on beer, using both theoretical and empirical arguments to show how the beer distribution system in the U.S. produced an increase in the retail price of beer that was greater than the increase in the tax.

Two other papers examined negative externalities and devised policies to remedy their effects. Laura Syn estimated the cost to U.S. society of the congestion on its highways, and then calculated an optimal congestion tax that would be used to fund an increase in bus routing in order to mitigate the negative externality, in a paper entitled “Combating Congestion: Congestion Tax and Expansion of Bus Routing and Coverage.” Six students from Davidson College examined the problem of wasted printer resources caused by the College’s current “free” printing for students, and presented two different solutions to this externality, in “Correcting the Externality of Free Printing at Davidson College: Pollution Abatement Taxes versus Marketable Printing Permits.”

The remaining papers examine many different topics, but are all excellent exercises in applied microeconomics, which use interesting microeconomic data sets. In “Describing Interracial Marriages and What They Convey Regarding Race Relations in America,” John Vickery used Census 2000 data to examine the trends in and determinants of interracial marriage, and assessed what the data say about the current state of race relations. Brandon Carroll took data from North Carolina middle schools and showed how crime and violence in these schools affects the math and verbal test scores of middle school students, in “The Effects of School Violence and Crime on Academic Achievement.” Joel Wiles, in a paper titled “Mixed Strategy Equilibrium in Tennis Serves,” collected data from professional tennis matches to test whether the players followed a modified mixed-strategy equilibrium in their choice of serves. Jennifer Kang, in “Defensive Medicine in Cardiology: Does it exist?” used a national sample of cardiac patients to show that defensive medicine appears to be practiced in cardiology. And finally, Susan Fisk collected photos from the Facebook website and then generated her own data from students’ ratings of these photos to test whether male-to-female ratios on college campuses affects how females present themselves on the Facebook site.   Her paper was titled “The Effect of Male-to-Female Ratio on Female Attractiveness.”

Special congratulations go to Corinne Low and Susan Fisk, whose papers were each awarded runner-up prizes, and especially to Joel Wiles, whose paper on tennis serves was selected as the Best Paper in the 2006 Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Thanks go out to many people whose efforts made the Symposium a great success.   Professor Ed Tower gave a wonderful keynote address at the Symposium banquet extolling the life of the economist and urging the assembled presenters to continue their work in economics. The Economics Student Union provided excellent logistical support, and the staff of the EcoTeach Center, especially Jennifer Becker, literally made the event work. And of course, we owe a great debt of thanks to the Allen Starling Johnson Jr. Fund for its financial support of the Symposium, and to the Johnson family for their participation in the sessions.

Connel Fullenkamp, Faculty Sponsor

Articles

Congressional Voting On DR_CAFTA: A Focus on Enviromental Lobbying by Pauline Abetti

Correcting the Externality of Free Printing at Davidson College: Pollution Abatement Taxes versus Marketable Printing Permits by Aaron Baila, Annie Butler, Brandon Carroll, Steven Gentile, Patrick McConville and Jordan Sundheim

The Effects of School Violence and Crime on Academic Achievement by Brandon R. Carroll

Federal Excise Taxes and the U.S. Beer Industry’s Three-Tier System of Distribution: Do beer manufacturers benefit from federal excise taxes? by Ankur Sunildatta Fadia

The Effect of Male-to-Female Ratio on Female Attractiveness by Susan Fisk

The Twin Deficits Revisited: A Cross-Country, Empirical Approach by Ethan Fleegler

Defensive Medicine in Cardiology: Does it exist? by Jennifer Kang

The Senegalese Experience: Rethinking Fertility Theory for Highly Religious Societies by Corinne S. Low

The Impact of the North Carolina Cigarette Excise Tax Increase on Cigarette Sales and Tax Revenue in North and South Carolina by Robert Palmer Steel

Combating Congestion: Expansion of bus routing and the congestion tax by Laura Syn

Describing Interracial Marriages and What They Convey Regarding Race Relations in America by John Michael Vickery

Mixed Strategy Equilibrium in Tennis Serves by Joel Wiles