Movements in the Digital Divide
By Benjamin Berg I explore how the “Digital Divide” in the United States manifests during the period from 2000 to 2007. I find that the digital divide is decreasing with home computer and Internet use. But a new divide has emerged with high-speed Internet. Even though the income gap is closing with home computer use, […]
A Model of Speculative Attacks and Devaluations in Korea and Indonesia
By Austin Lin Since the beginning of the Bretton Woods era, currency crises and speculative attacks have affected the world economy. This paper presents a model, originally derived by Blanco and Garber, that predicts one-period ahead probabilities of a currency devaluation and the expected exchange rate conditional on a devaluation. The analysis is then applied […]
Does the Quality of Public Transit Affect Commuters’ Response to Gasoline Price Changes?
By Allison Smith The effect of public transportation on commuters’ sensitivity to gas prices is examined using a proxy for the quality of public transportation. This proxy is measured as the difference in the individual’s predicted commute times by private transit and public transit, estimated using the individual’s observable characteristics. The interaction of gasoline price […]
Homelessness: A Preliminary Evaluation of an Effort to End Homelessness Durham County, NC
By Alexander Tilley The Durham Center is the public agency in Durham County responsible for connecting persons who are homeless or at risk of homelessness with the services that they need. In February of 2008 the Durham Center began to perform Care Review, where a 10-person Care Review team meets with an individual to develop […]
Driven to Cheat: A Study on the Drivers of Dishonesty—through the Game of Golf
By Scott McKenzie People like to think of themselves as more honest than the person sitting next to them. In practice, this cannot always be the case. Through two experiments, we investigated behavior in golf—a sport of self-governance, where the player is frequently confronted with opportunities to bend the rules and the score. Our research […]
An Investigation into the Interdependency of the Volatility of Technology Stocks
By Zoraver Lamba This paper examines the contemporaneous and dynamic relationships between the volatilities of the technology stocks in the S&P 100 index. Factor analysis and heterogeneous autoregressive regressions are used to examine contemporaneous and dynamic, inter-temporal relationships, respectively. Both techniques utilize high frequency data by measuring stock prices every 5 minutes from 1997-2008. We […]
Causal Inference and Understanding Causal Structure
By Alex Wang This thesis aims to show that explicit understanding of possible causal structures often aids in inferring the true causes from data. This is done by first understanding that causes are chains of counterfactual dependence. Insofar as experiments, active or natural are not perfect, data can easily support false counterfactuals. Even those tools […]
