Symposium Edition 2007

By Duke Economics in Uncategorized on August 9, 2007.

The Fifth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium was held on Friday, April 20 and Saturday, April 21, 2007, in the Social Sciences Building on Duke’s campus. This year, 13 papers from five North Carolina colleges and universities were presented. This was the first year that students from Wake Forest, Salem College, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte presented papers at the Symposium, and we hope that students from these institutions will continue to submit papers in the coming years.

Financial economics was the most popular topic area this year, with five papers. Three of the five papers investigated the behavior of particular financial prices. Michael Stanley focused on a new approach to modeling the moment-to-moment movement of prices of large stocks in “High Frequency Jump Characteristics of Large Capitalization Common Stocks.” In her paper, “The Value of Unsolicited “Buy” Recommendations to Investors,” Angela Aldrich used event-study methodology to analyze the behavior of small stocks that are touted by so-called spam emails. Tyler Patla compared pricing behavior between traditional bookmaking markets and electronic exchanges in his paper, “The Effect of Market Structure on Pricing Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Sports Betting Markets.” Two other financial economics papers focused on interesting questions in corporate finance. Chris Lin presented his paper “Corporate Swap Use and Its Effect on Swap Spreads,” while Amrith Krishnakumaar presented his paper entitled “Which Method of Pricing and Selling IPOs, Book-building or Auctions Might Be More Effective in Promoting an Issuer’s Aims?” All of these financial economics papers were authored by Duke students.

Several papers used economic analysis of large microeconomic data sets to examine current educational and social policy questions. Eddy Leal of Duke presented “Public Education in Puerto Rico: Does Class Size Matter?” which featured hard-to-obtain data on the performance of individual schools in Puerto Rico. Jessica Sprinkel of Wake Forest, who worked with the huge Census Bureau data sets, presented “Breaking Down Increasing Income Inequality in the U.S. over the Past Decade.” Stephen LaFata of Duke presented “Maternal Labor Decisions and the Effect on Adolescent Behavior,” which used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. And Andrew Nowobilski, also of Duke, utilized several microeconomic data sets in order to construct data for his paper, “Running from Money? The Puzzle of Bars and Liquor Stores Locating in Black Neighborhoods.”

Two papers also examined current policy questions, but used non-empirical methods of economic inquiry to produce interesting and distinctive analyses. David Hansen of UNC-Charlotte used both philosophical arguments as well as theoretical analysis to examine the economics of eminent domain in his paper, “Kelo vs. New London: Economics and Ethics.” And Xanthine Basnet, of Salem College, used case study evidence she collected on a study trip to Nepal in her paper entitled “Microcredit Strategies and Their Challenges in Nepal.”

The two remaining papers developed theoretical models. Ryan Wesslen of UNC-Chapel Hill built a macro model that incorporated his idea that social constraints on women’s opportunities were relaxed as countries industrialized, and that this affected economic performance. His paper was entitled “An Endogenous Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Fertility: England 1881-1931.” Selin Dilmener of Duke, on the other hand, built a microeconomic model to explain why some people refuse to evacuate when a hurricane is forecast to land on their city. Her paper was called “A Theory of Evacuation as a Coordination Problem.”

Congratulations and thanks go out to all the authors, who wrote outstanding papers and gave polished and clear presentations. Special congratulations go to Selin Dilmener, whose excellent paper was perfectly matched by her enthusiastic and well structured presentation. She won the Best Paper Prize. Andrew Nowobilski earned the runner-up prize for his paper and presentation, both of which compressed a staggering volume of work into an interesting and accessible package.

Connel Fullenkamp
Faculty Sponsor