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A Franchise Education: The Impact of High School Quality on the Operations of Quick Service Restaurant Franchises in Texas
By Joseph Yetter While the franchise business model provides customers with a certain level of consistency, there is still considerable variation in service quality across locations. Among other factors, a franchise’s quality of human capital (i.e., its workers) contributes to the quality of its operations, one of the strongest determinants of its revenue. Assuming that […]
What is the Effect of Regulatory Supervision on the Profitability and Outreach of Microfinance Institutions?
By Nikolaus Axmann Regulatory supervision is an important part of the formal banking process. As microfinance institutions have developed and multiplied, they have become more closely regulated, which has allowed many of them to evolve into more traditional banks. But there are concerns over microfinance regulation, as complying with regulatory can be costly, particularly for […]
The Impact of State and Local Government Spending on Charitable Giving in the United States
By Lynn Vandendriessche This paper seeks to further understand how government spending impacts private giving to charitable organizations. It considers giving and spending in the United States in 2008 with a focus on government spending on education, welfare, healthcare, and hospitals. Government spending is looked at at the state and local levels. The results indicate […]
The Impact of Suburbanization on Poverty Concentration: Using Transportation Networks to Predict the Spatial Distribution of Poverty
By Winston Riddick The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of concentrated poverty, a phenomenon where socioeconomically deprived groups are heavily concentrated in particular neighborhoods in a metropolitan area. Drawing on Land Use Theory and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis, I develop a theory that identifies suburbanization as a principal cause of poverty […]
Has Tort Reform Been Effective in Abating the Medical Malpractice Crisis? An Empirical Analysis from 1991-2012
By Raj Singh and Jiten Solanki This paper evaluates the impact of malpractice reforms on average malpractice payment awards, frequency of malpractice claims, and malpractice premiums for internists, surgeons, and OB/GYNS. We also empirically test the physician-induced demand (PID) hypothesis in the context of the medical malpractice environment. Our results suggest that caps on noneconomic […]
The Relationship between and Geographic Distribution of Breast Cancer Statistics: Diagnosis, Survival, and Mortality in Selected Areas in the United States, 1973-2004
By Timothy Rooney Using breast cancer registry data from the United States and regression models controlling for race, marital status, and county-level variation, this research analyzes the connections between these statistics and the geographic variation of each of them. In doing so, it determines that stage of diagnosis has a significant impact on survival likelihood […]
Video Game Sales: Does Diversity Pay?
By Hai Lin “Helena” Wu The video game industry has grown into a mature market in the past decade, surpassing the size of the U.S. film industry in 2009. As a result of the rise in popularity of video gaming amongst many demographic groups of the American population, the underrepresentation of female and ethnic minorities […]
Conditional Beta Model for Asset Pricing By Sector in the U.S. Equity Markets
By Yuci Zhang In nance, the beta of an investment is a measure of the risk arising from exposure to general market movements as opposed to idiosyncratic factors. Therefore, reliable estimates of stock portfolio betas are essential for many areas in modern nance, including asset pricing, performance evaluation, and risk management. In this paper, we […]
Market Dynamics and the Forward Premium Anomaly: A Model of Interacting Agents
By Phillip Hogan and Evan Myer This paper presents a stochastic model of exchange rates, which is used to explain the forward premium anomaly. In the model, agents switch between four trading strategies, and these changes drive the evolution of the exchange rate. This framework is meant to more realistically represent the important market dynamics […]
Exceeding the Threshold: Analysis of Public Information Transfer using Instrumental Variables
By Gabrielle Inder This paper examines how information transfer about contamination levels found at brownfield sites capitalizes into nearby property values. More specifically, a hedonic model is used to test the impact on housing transaction prices when a binary measure (i.e. exceeding a threshold or not) or a continuous measure (i.e. chemical levels) is used. […]
