The Impact of Family Policies on Fertility in OECD Countries
by Timothy Lloyd O’Brien Abstract This study investigates the impact of family policies in addressing declining fertility rates across OECD countries between 1990 and 2019. Over the past six decades, fertility rates in these nations have dropped substantially, with most falling below replacement level. This study evaluates the influence of three core policy instruments: cash […]
Free University? An Investigation of Australia’s 1974 Free Higher Education Policy and Its Impact on Enrollment, Degree Completion, Later-Life Occupational Status, and Income
by Yaxuan “Annie” Cui Abstract To what extent has the free higher education policy of 1974 impacted Australian students’ decisions of university enrollment, degree completion, and later-life human capital development? In this paper, I analyze the impact of the policy from both national descriptive statistics and individual-level enrollment and degree completion decisions using the Australian […]
The Press and Peace, Examining Iraq War Coverage in Newspapers using BERT LLMs
by Jakobe Bussey Abstract This study utilizes state-of-the-art BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models to perform sentiment analysis on Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles about the Iraq War published between 2002 and 2012 and further categorize them using advanced unsupervised machine learning techniques. By utilizing statistical analysis and quartic regression models, […]
Bias in Fact Checking?: An Analysis of Partisan Trends Using PolitiFact Data
by Thomas A. Colicchio Abstract Fact checking is one of many tools that journalists use to combat the spread of fake news in American politics. Like much of the mainstream media, fact checkers have been criticized as having a left-wing bias. The efficacy of fact checking as a tool for promoting honesty in public discourse […]
Revisiting California Proposition 209: Changes in Science Persistence Rates and Overall Graduation Rates
by Anh-Huy Nguyen Abstract California Proposition 209 outlawed race-based affirmative action in the University of California (UC) system in 1998. However, the UC system subsequently shifted towards race-blind affirmative action by also reweighing factors other than race in the admissions process. To evaluate the hypothetical changes in the science persistence rate and graduation rate of […]
Maternal Grandparent Living Arrangements and the Motherhood Wage Penalty for Mothers in China
by Mary Wang Abstract Living arrangements of mothers in China significantly impact their annual wages and motherhood wage penalties. I study how the presence of mothers’ parents, or the maternal grandparents, affect mothers’ wages for each child living in the mothers’ households. Existing literature finds that mothers in China not only experience a motherhood wage […]
Bridging the Persistence Gap: An Investigation of the Underrepresentation of Female and Minority Students in STEM Fields
By Aaditya Jain and Bailey Kaston Prior literature on mismatch theory has concentrated primarily on minority students, whose lower average levels of pre-enrollment preparedness tend to discourage them from persisting in STEM fields as often as their non-minority counterparts at selective universities. Our study shifts the focus to the persistence gap between men and women, […]
Incentives to Quit in Men’s Professional Tennis: An Empirical Test of Tournament Theory
By Will Walker This paper studies the influence of incentives on quitting behaviors in professional men’s tennis tournaments and offers broader implications to pay structures in the labor market. Precedent literature established that prize incentives and skill heterogeneity can impact player effort exertion. Prize incentives include prize money and indirect financial rewards (ranking points). Players […]
Team Payroll Versus Performance in Professional Sports: Is Increased Spending Associated with Greater Success?
by Grant Shorin Abstract Professional sports are a billion-dollar industry, with player salaries accounting for the largest expenditure. Comparing results between the four major North American leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL) and examining data from 1995 through 2015, this paper seeks to answer the following question: do teams that have higher payrolls achieve greater […]
Long-Term Contracts and Predicting Performance in MLB
By Drew Goldstein In this paper, I examine whether MLB teams are capable of using players’ past performance data to sufficiently estimate future production. The study is motivated by the recent trend by which teams have increasingly signed long-term contracts that lock in players for up to ten seasons into the future. To test this […]
