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How Consumers Make Impulse Purchases and the Influence of Peers and a Market-Based Setting

By Arjan Saraon Many organizations are designed to protect, educate and helping consumer with their financial decision–making. This paper examines the valuation of various non–essential goods in both a marketplace setting and slider–based setting, and in both a neutral influence and social influence condition. In a marketplace valuation setting, it is found that prices and price–searching behavior are the most significant predictors of a decision to checkout a good. In […]

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Program Characteristics and Economic Conditions That Affect WIC Participation

By Amy Tingle WIC is one of the most expansive food assistance programs in the United States. Despite extensive research demonstrating the health benefits of participation, there is a sizable gap between those that are eligible and those that enroll. This paper studies how economic conditions and program characteristics affect both eligibility and coverage rates using post recession data […]

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Proposing an Alternative to the European Central Bank’s Fiscal Convergence Criteria

By Junaid Arefeen The recent onset of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has brought the viabil-ity of the Eurozone as a currency area into question. The unsustainable debt and deficit balances accumulated by several Eurozone nations since the adoption of the common currency in 1999, and the consequent incidence of high levels of sovereign […]

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Variations in Turkey’s Female Labor Market: The Puzzling Role of Education

By Rachel Anderson Although Turkey ranks among the world’s 20 largest economies, female labor force participation in Turkey is surprisingly low.  Relative to other developed countries, however, the proportion of Turkish women in senior management is high.  One explanation for these contrasting pictures of Turkey’s female labor force is education.  To better understand how women’s education and household characteristics explain variations in Turkey’s female labor market, I use annual Turkish Household Labour Force Survey data from […]

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The Professor and the Coal Miner: The effect of socioeconomic and geographical factors on breast cancer diagnosis and survival outcome

By Shelley Chen Previous studies reported that patients who live farther from cancer centers do not necessarily experience delayed cancer detection and shortened survival. However, the results are biased because of the incomplete observation of patient survival, which cannot be properly accounted for with the multivariable regression model. In this thesis, I isolated the effect […]

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Deterring Ineffcient Gambling in Risk-Taking Agents

By Ryan Westphal This paper proposes a model describing the incentive issues faced by principals and agents when the agent has limited liability and is capable of undertaking unidentifiable, inefficient risky behavior. We propose a contract structure by which the principal deters risk by deferring payment to the agent until she reaches an absorbing steady-state […]

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Medicare’s Prospective Payment System: Do Differences in the Reimbursement Rate Affect Quantity of Care Delivered and Hospital Billing Practices?

By Russell Hollis When the government changes Medicare policy, payment structures often accommodate the change through lowering reimbursement rates. Changes in reimbursements raise the question of what effect changes have on patient care. Using data sets from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, I examine the diagnosis of major replacement or reattachment of the […]

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Google Search Volume Index: Predicting Returns, Volatility and Trading Volume of Tech Stocks

By Rui Xu This paper investigates the efficacy of using Google Search Volume Index (SVI), a publicly available tool Google provides via Google Trends, to predict stock movements within the tech sector. Relative changes in weekly search volume index are recorded from April 2004 to March 2015 and correlated with weekly returns, realized volatility and […]

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Understanding Financial Incentive Health Initiatives: The Impact of the Janani Suraksha Yojana Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Institutional Delivery Rates and Out-of- Pocket Health Expenditure

By Ritika Jain Demand-side financing is a policy tool used by nations to incentivize utilization of public institutions, and India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is one of the largest such financial incentive programs in the world. The program pays eligible pregnant women to deliver their babies in health institutions partnered with the program. This paper […]

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The Implications of Population Aging for Economic Growth a Regional Comparative Study

By Paige Muggeridge I use a reduced form regression model to determine the extent to which population aging accounts for economic growth in each of the nine regions of the world. Predominantly, I build upon the research of Bloom et al. (2010), which is central to formulating my regression equation. I separate the difference between […]

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