Religious Identity and Climate-Sustainable Behavior
by Zixin “Finnie” Zhao Abstract What motivates individual action on climate change? The study focuses on the potential influence of religious identities. It employs a laboratory experiment to investigate how priming religious identity affects individuals’ donation behaviors to climate versus non-climate charities in a dictator game setting. In contrast with expectations, this study finds no […]
Economic Situations and Social Distance: Taxation and Donation
by Alexander Brandt Abstract: This experimental study evaluated the effects of two common economic situations – taxation and donation – on the social distance between participants in the situations, an original effect of interest that is the opposite of prior research. This study employed a novel survey framework, in which subjects gave money to others […]
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 […]
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 […]
Are the Chinese Altruistic? Explaining Motives behind Chinese Intergenerational Transfers using the Strategic Bequest Motive
By Lucy Yin Two main competing theories regarding intergenerational transfers from adult children to elderly parents exist: the altruism model and the exchange model. The strategic bequest motive supports the exchange model in claiming parents with bequeathable wealth will incentivize children to devote more resources to parents in order to receive a larger bequest. I […]
The Effects of Prevention and Treatment Interventions in a Microeconomic Model of HIV Transmission
By Allison Stashko A rational choice-based model for sexual transmission of HIV demonstrates the behavioral and epidemiological effects of public health interventions. Susceptible individuals choose to protect or expose, both responding to and determining HIV prevalence. Interventions are modeled as exogenous shocks to the cost of protection, treatment coverage, and treatment quality. A prevention intervention […]
Integrating Medicare and Medicaid Healthcare Delivery and Reimbursement Policies for Dual Eligible Beneficiaries: A Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Managed Care
By Kan Zhang 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 […]
