Symposium Edition 2008
The sixth annual Undergraduate Research Symposium was held on April 11-12 in the Social Sciences building. Thirteen papers were presented by students from Duke University, the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Davidson College. This year, we received more submissions than ever and the overall quality of the papers, even the ones not accepted, was quite high.
Financial economics was again a popular topic for student research, particularly among Duke students. Peter Van Tassel presented “Patterns Within the Trading Day: Volatility and Jump Discontinuities in High Frequency Equity Price Series,” Andrey Fradkin presented “The Informational Content of Implied Volatility in Individual Stocks and the Market,” and Ryan Tolkin and Michael Sloyer presented “VIX as a Fix: Equity Volatility in a Life Cycle Investing Context.” All of these authors are Duke students. Emmanuel Bello from UNC-Chapel Hill mixed financial economics with industrial organization in his paper, “Revisiting the Davis Thesis: Preliminary Evidence of Stock Market Impact on Industrial Concentration.”
Family economics was also well represented at this year’s Symposium. These papers included “The Effects of Sexual Education on Women’s Labor Force Participation,” by Meghan Morris of UNC-Chapel Hill; “Risky Business: The Effect of Family Income on Teen Risky Sexual Behavior,” by Valerie Kaplan and Caitlin McLaughlin, both of Duke; and “The Effect of Abortion Restrictions on Foster Care Entry Rates,” by Sarah Sutherland, also a Duke student.
Education policy was the other topic area with multiple papers presented. The first was “Tracking Decisions in North Carolina’s Public High Schools,” by Mike Harris of Duke. The second was a joint effort among Davidson College students Ben Ellinor, Arthur Etchells, and Andrew Waddell entitled “Improving Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools: Addressing Labor Market Failures.”
Several other excellent papers individually represented other fields of economics. Aleksandr Andreev’s paper “To Work or Not to Work: Labor Supply Decisions of Russia’s Disabled” dealt with a fundamental issue in labor economics. Aleksandr is a Duke student. R. Andrew Butters of UNC-Chapel Hill presented this year’s microeconomic theory paper, “The Effect of the Learning Curve on the Optimal Dynamic Contract.” And finally, Sruthi Thatchenkery of Duke presented the timely empirical microeconomics paper “Determinants of Demand for Hybrid-Electric Vehicles.”
One paper presented in this year’s Symposium does not appear in this issue of the DJE because it has already appeared in an earlier issue: Jiasheng Lee’s “Evaluating the Elderly Retired in a Tiebout Context.” Jiasheng is a Duke student.
Special congratulations go out to Aleksandr Andreev for winning the Best Paper prize, and to Peter Van Tassel, who won the Runner Up prize this year.
Connel Fullenkamp, Faculty Sponsor
Articles
To Work or Not to Work? Labor Supply Decisions of Russia’s Disabled by Aleksandr A. Andreev
Revisiting the Davis Thesis: Preliminary Evidence of Stock Market Impact on Industrial Concentration by Emmanuel Bello
The Effect of the Learning Curve on the Optimal Dynamic Contract by R. Andrew Butters
The Informational Content of Implied Volatility in Individual Stocks and the Market by Andrey Fradkin
Tracking Decisions in North Carolina’s Public High Schools by Michael B. Harris
Risky Business: The Effect of Family Income on Teen Risky Sexual Behavior by Valerie Kaplan and Caitlin McLaughlin
The Effect of Sexual Education on Women’s Labor Force Participation by Meghan Morris
The VIX as a Fix: Equity Volatility as a Lifelong Investment Enhancer by Michael Sloyer and Ryan Tolkin
Undue Burdens: The Effect of Abortion Restrictions on Foster Care Entry Rates by Sarah MacDonald Sutherland
Determinants of Automobile Demand and Implications for Hybrid-Electric Market Penetration by Sruthi M. Thatchenkery
Patterns Within the Trading Day: Volatility and Jump Discontinuities in High Frequency Equity Price Series by Peter Van Tassel
Vol. XIX, Spring 2007
The Duke Journal of Economics is published each year to showcase outstanding research in economics by Duke undergraduates. This volume contains both honors theses and essays. The articles are examples of research written by Duke Undergraduates at various stages of their economics education at Duke. Honors theses which were presented at the 2006 undergraduate research symposium and are to be published in the special edition of the Duke Journal of Economics devoted to that symposium are not included here.
The Allen Starling Johnson, Jr, award for the best thesis was shared by R. Selin Dilmenter and Tzuo Hann Law. Dilmenter’s thesis “A Theory of Evacuation as a Coordination Problem” is published in the symposium issue of the DJE, and Law’s thesis, “The Elusiveness of Systematic Jumps,” is published in this issue.
We dedicate this issue to the memory of Peggy East. Peggy joined the Duke economics department in 1979, serving as secretary and eventually the administrative assistant and continuing to return to help after her retirement from full time work. At our service in her honor this spring several members of the department spoke. We include their reflections on Peggy here. At the service Tom Nechyba announced that henceforth the economics department conference room would be known as “The Peggy B. East conference room.” Her name is on the door and her picture on the wall facing those of the past chairs of the department.
Some honors theses lead to publication in the profession’s peer reviewed journals. Pauline Abetti (Duke BS, Economics, 2006) will be publishing a revision of her honors thesis, “Congressional Voting on DR-CAFTA: A Focus on Environmental Lobbying” in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Policy Reform.
Five undergraduate and master’s students wrote book reviews in the spring of 2007, which have been scheduled for publication in scholarly journals. We are delighted that their critical skills are being appreciated by the profession. These are:
- Indra Astrayuda, On the Wealth of Nations, by P.J. O’Rourke. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006. Econochannel (published by State University of Jakarta, Indonesia) forthcoming in September 2007 and also on the journal’s website.
- Simon Blank, A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy, by George Lodge and Craig Wilson. Princeton University Press, 2006. Journal of Economic Ideas.
- Agung Budilaksono, East Asia, Globalization, and the New Economy, by F. Gerard Adams, Routledge, 2006. South Asia Economic Journal, (published in India) forthcoming in September 2007.
- Katelyn Donnelly, The Marketplace of Christianity, by Robert B. Ekelund, Robert Hébert, and Robert Tollison. MIT Press, 2006. History of Political Economy.
- Annah Peterson, Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier, by Harry G. Broadman, The World Bank, 2007. Africa Today, forthcoming in early 2008.
Our department is pleased when undergraduates organize house seminars for themselves and other undergraduates. Joshua Kazdin developed and chaired a course titled “Investment, Political Economy and Economic Regionalism in Asia.” The syllabus for that course is available on the “Open Courseware for the Study of China’s Economy” website: http://ics.nccu.edu.tw/eced/eocw/.
We congratulate the students mentioned above and the authors of the research presented in this issue.
Thanks go to Chris Genwright, who put the journal online.
Charles Becker & Ed Tower, Faculty Advisors to the Journal
Honor’s Theses
Occupation Segregation and Gender Earnings Differentials in Slovenia by Arup Banerjee
A Case Study on the Informational Role of Futures Markets: Can Weather Futures Forecast Electricity Consumption? by Ying Chiat Ho
An Empirical Study of the Anticommons Effect on Public vs. Private Researchers by Serena S. Lam
The Elusiveness of Systematic Jumps by Tzuo Hann Law
Modern ART: Determining a Couple’s Most Cost-Effective Embryo Transfer Decision by Theresa A. Poulos
Articles
Cursed by Bounty: The Natural Resource Curse and Policy Recommendations to Correct the Curse by Nick Anderson
The Impact of Globalization on U.S. Workers: Discussion of the Issue in American Society by Ikee Gardner
Innovation, Parallel Trade, and the Pharmaceutical Industry by Owen Gehrett
Modifications and Implications of Pricing Models: A Study of Assessed Property Values in Durham County, North Carolina by Meg Kedrowski
TRIPS and the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Welfare Analysis by Ashley Kustu
Hydrogen Fuel—An Economically Viable Future for the Transportation Industry? by Toby Kraus
Growth: A Tale of Trade by Sanjay Narayan
Symposium Edition 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
Articles
The Value of Unsolicited Buy Recommendations to Investors: Can Investors Trade Profitably Based on E-mail Spam? by Angela Nicole Aldrich
Microcredit programs and their challenges in Nepal by Xanthine Basnet
A Theory of Evacuation as a Coordination Problem by R. Selin Dilmener
Kelo v. New London: Economics and Ethics by David Hansen
Breaking Down Increasing Earnings Inequality in the U.S. 1990-2004 by Jessica Sprinkel
Book-building versus Auctions: An investigation into which IPO pricing and selling method more effectively promotes the aims of an IPO issuer by Amrith Krushnakumaar
Maternal Labor Decisions and the Effects on Adolescent Risky Behavior by Stephen M. LaFata
Public Education in Puerto Rico: Does Class Size Matter? by Eddy V. Leal
Corporate Swap Use and Its Effect on Swap Spreads by Christopher Paul Lin
Running from Money? The puzzle of bars and liquor stores locating in black neighborhoods by Andrew J. Nowobilski
The Effect of Market Structure on Pricing Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Sports Betting Markets by Tyler Hofman Patla
High Frequency Jump Characteristics of Financial Asset Prices by Michael Stanley
An Endogenous Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Fertility for England 1881-1931 by Ryan S. Wesslen
Vol. XVIII, Spring 2006
The Duke Journal of Economics is published each year to showcase outstanding research in economics by Duke undergraduates. This volume contains both honors theses and essays. The essays are examples of research written by Duke Undergraduates at various stages of their economics education at Duke. Honors theses which were presented at the 2006 undergraduate research symposium and are to be published in the special edition of the Duke Journal of Economics devoted to that symposium are not included here.
Four undergraduate and masters students wrote book reviews in the spring of 2006, which have been scheduled for publication in scholarly journals. We are delighted that their critical skills are being appreciated by the profession. These are:
- Karl Boulware, The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Survive When Oil Costs $200 A Barrel, by Steven Leeb with Glen Strathy, Warner, 2006.Indian Journal of Economics and Business.
- Daniel Hughes, Capital and Collusion: The Political Logic of Global Economic Development, by Hilton Root, Princeton, 2005, Development Policy Review .
- Carly Knight, The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working, by Robert Calderisi, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, Review of Social Economy .
- Phuong H. Nguyen, Globalization for Development, by Ian A. Goldin and Kenneth A. Reinert, Palgrave MacMillan and World Bank, 2006, Journal of International Logistics and Trade .
We congratulate the authors of the research presented in this issue.
For support of the journal we thank the Allen Starling Johnson, Jr. Endowment Fund and donors to the Harvrilesky Fund, as well as Jennifer Socey, who put the journal online.
Charles Becker & Ed Tower, Faculty Advisors to the Journal
Part I
The CNOOC Bid for Unocal and US National Security: Was the Political Outcry in Congress Justified? by Genevieve Ding
A Century of Economic Thought as Examined through American Trade Unionism by Christian Bonilla and Kathryn F. Fortunato
Complementary Currencies: Mutual Credit Currency Systems and the Challenge of Globalization by Clare Lascelles
Infrastructure and Urban Primacy: A Theoretical Model by Jinghui Lim
Separating the Bulls from the Herd: Race Distribution and Median Household Income in Durham County by Ryan Mattison
Continuity and Change in American Economic Thought Regarding Immigration: 1890-1950 and 1985-1995 by Russell Miller and Chinedu Okpukpara
Implications of Transnational Terrorism on International Trade by John McKenna
Part II
Price Discrimination and the Internet: A look at the changing face of the college textbook industry by Jeffrey Alan Ackermann
Did Unilateral Divorce Laws and No-Fault Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? by Michael Joseph Horowitz
Efficiency of IPO Offering Techniques: Semi-theoretical Framework and Empirical Results for US and Chinese Issues by Xinfeng Hu
Public Policies and Private Decisions: An Analysis of the Effects of Abortion Restrictions on Minors’ Contraceptive Behavior by Leland M. McNabb Jr.
Understanding the Role of the Arts and Women in the Economy: The Contributions of Creative Literature by Danielle P. Petrilli
Could the Kaminsky-Reinhart Model Have Predicted the 2002 Uruguayan Currency and Banking Crises? by Steven R. Vickers
Symposium Edition 2006
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
