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A Further Exploration of Reverse Takeovers as an Alternative to Initial Public Offerings

By Matt LoSardo and Zhunliang Zhu In theory a reverse takeover (RTO) should be a viable alternative to initial public offerings (IPO) for private companies looking to access the public capital markets.  Since the IPO process can be very timely and include significant costs, both direct and indirect, we analyze reverse takeovers as an alternative […]

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How Do Different Parental Beliefs and Parenting behaviors Affect Students’ College Academic Performance?

By Zifan Lin I examine the differences between Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans with respect to parental beliefs, parenting behaviors, and college academic achievement. The results suggest that 1) there is a strong causal effect of study time on college performance, 2) parental strictness and emphasis on education distinguish Asian American students from Caucasian American […]

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Trailer Park Economics

By Caitlin Gorback In this paper, we explore the various reasons behind the development of the American institution of trailer parks. The first two models arise in equilibrium, the last two respond to housing shocks. Models include “Bad Tenants” in which tenants and landowners contract to protect against bad neighbors, a basic “Capital Constraints model […]

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Taming the Dragon: The Modernization of the Chinese Equity Markets and its Effects on IPO Underpricing

By William Benesh The extreme underpricing of Chinese Initial Public Offerings in the early days of the Chinese equity markets was reduced by several reforms instituted by the Chinese government from around 2000 to 2002. These reforms reduced 1-day returns on IPOs from 295% to 72%. The reforms reduced IPO underpricing by decreasing the inequality […]

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Neighborhood Effects and School Performance: The Impact of Public Housing Demolitions on Children in North Carolina

By Rebecca Aqostino This study explores how the demolitions of particularly distressed public housing units, through the Home Ownership for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) grants program, have affected academic outcomes for children in adjacent neighborhoods in Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina. I measure neighborhood-level changes and individual effects through regression analysis. All students in demolition […]

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Market Power & Reciprocity Among Vertically Integrated Cable Providers

By Jeffery Shih-kai Shen This paper seeks to investigate the effects of vertical integration on the cable industry. There are two main goals that the research paper will attempt to address. The first is to build upon existing research on favoritism shown by multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to affiliated video programming networks. Second, the […]

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Incentives in Professional Tennis: Tournament Theory and Intangible Factors

By Steven Seidel and Joshua Silverman This paper analyzes the incentives of professional tennis players in a tournament setting, as a proxy for workers in a firm. Previous studies have asserted that workers exert more effort when monetary incentives are increased, and that effort is maximized when marginal pay dispersion varies directly with position in […]

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Beta Estimation Using High Frequency Data

By Angela Ryu Using high frequency stock price data in estimating nancial measures often causes serious distortion. It is due to the existence of the market microstructure noise, the lag of the observed price to the underlying value due to market friction. The adverse eect of the noise can be avoided by choosing an appropriate […]

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“Winner-­Take-­All Economics” Professional Inquiry and Public Discourse on Material Inequality

By Jonathan Pryor What can account for the failure of economists to extend a firm guiding hand into the public discourse on material inequality in contemporary America? This paper reviews historical and modern economic literature and then extends its focus to the debates in the public sector, private opinion, “think tanks,” the news media, the […]

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The Nurture Effect: Like Father, Like Son. What about for an Adopted Child? A Study of Korean-American Adoptees on the Impact of Family Environment and Genes

By Suanna Seung-yun Oh I investigate the influences of family environment and genes on children’s educational outcomes by working with data on Korean American adoptees and their non-adoptive siblings. I make use of the natural experiment setting where children were quasi-randomly assigned to families. From Sacerdote’s discussion of the three different approaches of analyzing the […]

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Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu