Economic Perception and Cable News: Evidence from Panel Data, 2016–2020
by Audrey S. Wang Abstract This paper employs a panel approach to investigate the role of partisan cable news in shaping economic perceptions using the VOTER Survey dataset (2016–2020) and sentiment-scored transcripts from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, examining how sentiment and coverage intensity interact with individuals’ viewership patterns to affect macroeconomic assessments. Findings suggest […]
Reel Representation: The Economic Impact of Gender on Bollywood Box Office Revenue
by Sidharth Ravi Abstract The Hindi Film Industry, known as Bollywood, is seen as a gatekeeper of Indian culture. Annually thousands of films are produced, half a million workers across India are employed and millions in revenue is created. Although Bollywood has ensured increased employment and wage opportunities for women on and off screen, the […]
Externalities of Overhead Power Lines on Residential Housing Values
by Jake Park-Walters Abstract Overhead electricity transmission lines (OHLs) create negative externalities on nearby housing values largely from perceived factors including aesthetics, safety, and health. Studies have been performed outside of the US to determine the specific value impact of power lines by proximity. It is not, however, well researched within the United States–specifically in […]
The Impact of Quiet Zone Implementation on Accident Incidence at Highway-rail Grade Crossings
by Jack Duhon Abstract In the last five years, (2019-2023) there have been 10,704 accidents at highway-rail grade crossings (HRGCs) in the United States, resulting in 3,859 injuries and 1,233 fatalities. This paper seeks to address impact of quiet zones, where trains are not allowed to blow their horns before going through a crossing, on […]
RadioWaves and Ballot Boxes: How Conservative Broadcasting Influenced Southern Electoral Behavior
by Ian Carlson Bailey Abstract This study examines how conservative talk radio influenced electoral behavior in the American South during the postwar era. Focusing on Carl McIntire’s “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour” program, I exploit exogenous variation in radio signal strength driven by topographical differences to identify causal effects on voting patterns. Using a novel dataset […]
A Comparison of the HHI and the Procurement-Based Framework in Merger Review
by Kenneth Gong Abstract The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a measure of market concentration, plays a critical role in the U.S. Merger Guidelines. It is used as a threshold metric that marks certain mergers as potentially harmful to consumers. However, the microfoundations for the HHI are grounded in the Cournot oligopoly model, which may not be […]
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, […]
Beyond the But-For World: Weak-necessity causal reasoning for model-based counterfactuals in law and economics
by Lilia Qian Abstract Under current standards for scientific evidence defined under Daubert, antitrust models are frequently excluded from legal consideration, but not always for reasons that make them genuinely unreliable. This paper clarifies why antitrust models face difficulties when subjected to methodological scrutiny: the employment of model-based counterfactual arguments under an epistemically defective ‘but-for’ […]
Airline Non-Price Competition Between FSC and LCC Carriers: Varying Airline Optimization Strategies
by Lucas Johnson Abstract The goal of this paper is to extend the discourse surrounding certain topics in terms of airline optimization which is defined in this paper as the ability of an airline to efficiently transport goods and passengers as well as accrue revenue from its airplanes relative to its total capacity to transport […]
The Cost of Delay: Evidence from the Ethereum Transaction Fee Market
by Yinhong “William” Zhao Abstract Delaying a financial transaction can be costly, but the cost of delay is difficult to estimate in traditional finance. I exploit the unique data offering and market design of the Ethereum blockchain to estimate the cost of delaying financial transactions in decentralized finance (DeFi). I construct a dynamic auction model […]
