Social Capital and Financial Development after Economic Shocks: Evidence from Italy after the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009
By Sujay Rao & Ethan Lampert Like traditional forms of capital, social capital – an intangible measure of an individual’s social networks, trust in institutions, and participation in civic life – has implications for personal and financial behavior. Individuals from educated, well established backgrounds with fruitful family ties may be more amenable to opening new […]
The Impact of Originality in a Transitioning Movie Industry
By Jacob Graber-Lipperman The thesis explores the increasing success of non-original films distributed through traditional theatrical releases, and asks whether new distributors, such as Netflix, may serve as better platforms for original content. A dataset incorporating the top 100 highest-grossing films at the domestic box office each year from 2000 to 2018, as well as […]
The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?
By Hayley Jordan Barton This research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very […]
Sister competition and birth order effects among marriage-aged girls: Evidence from a field experiment in rural Bangladesh
By Stephanie Zhong Early marriage before the age of 18 is prevalent among adolescent girls in Bangladesh, but the timing of marriage is not uniform across daughters within a household, with some sisters marrying earlier than others. Using survey data from a novel field experiment from rural Bangladesh, I find that girls ages 10-21 with […]
The Toll of Commuting: The Effects of Commute Time on Well-Being
by M. Thomas Marshall Jr. Abstract When deciding on housing location, people theoretically optimize for the best location given their commute time, housing cost, income, as well as other factors. Stutzer and Frey (2008) suggest that this is not true in some nations, such as in their investigation of Germany, with their results showing that […]
24K Magic: Evidence on Maternal Asset Ownership and Children’s Long Term Outcomes in Indonesia
By Maya Durvasula Household resource allocation in response to economic shocks is of central importance for policy makers, especially given widely documented evidence of gender biases. In this paper, I exploit a plausibly exogenous shock to maternal asset holdings in Indonesia to examine gender biases in resource allocation in the wake of the 1998 East […]
Protecting Long Term Human Capital in a Financial Crisis: Evidence from the Indonesian Family Life Survey
by Sachet Bangia Abstract The East Asian Financial crisis of the late nineties made its way to Indonesia in January 1998. Using longitudinal data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (1993-2015), this paper studies the impact of the crisis on education attainment. In the midst of economic upheaval, households with liquid assets at hand, particularly […]
The Effects of Religion and Patriarchal Norms on Female Labor Force Participation
by Chidinma Hannah Nnoromele Abstract This paper provides an empirical study of the influence of religion, religiosity, and patriarchal norms on female labor force participation across 40 countries. Using micro-level data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2012: “Family and Changing Gender Roles IV and macro-level data from World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and […]
The Decision to Marry of Cohabit and Economic Crises
By Jennifer Garand This paper aims to investigate the relationship between peoples’ decisions to marry or cohabit and their economic circumstances – both personal, as measured by their employment status, and peripheral, as measured by the unemployment rate in their local county. This paper will look at the role economic factors, as well as demographic and personal factors, play in the decision of whether or not to marry, cohabit, […]
The Market for Apples: A Theory of Identity and Consumption
By Clement Lee This paper presents an economic model of the effects of identity and social norms on consumption patterns. By incorporating qualitative studies in psychology and sociology, I propose a utility function that features two components – economic (functional) and identity elements. This setup is extended to analyze a market comprising a continuum of consumers, whose identity distribution along a spectrum of binary identities is described by a Beta distribution. I also introduce the notion of salience in […]
