Trauma Center Efficacy: Certification Status and its Effect on Traffic Fatalities at Varying Radii
By Robert Van Dusen The goal of the paper is to better inform policy makers on the optimal placement of trauma center facilities. Below, I examine the effect of Californian trauma centers vs. standard emergency departments on traffic fatalities for 2002 to 2008. Hospital addresses are geocoded and compared to the geographic coordinates of fatal […]
Incentives and Characteristics that Explain Generic Prescribing Practices
By Rahul Nayak This study uses the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (2006-2010) and Health Tracking Physician Survey (2008) to study the incentives and characteristics that explain physician generic prescribing habits. The findings can be characterized into four main categories: (1) financial/economic, (2) informational, (3) patient- dependent and (4) drug idiosyncratic effects. Physicians in practices […]
Variance Risk Premium Dynamics: The Impact of Asset Price Jumps on Variance Risk Premia
By Jackson Pfeiffer This paper utilizes the high-frequency stock price data and the corresponding daily option price data of several highly capitalized corporations in order to investigate the impact that asset price jumps of individual equities have on the equities’ respective variance risk premia. The findings of this paper describe many characteristics of the variance […]
Government Allocation of Import Quota Slots to US Films in China’s Cinematic Movie Market
By Sabrina McCutchan The Chinese government implements a complex regulatory system to decrease the market share of imported Hollywood films for theatrical release. The import quota, censorship, and competitive release-scheduling policies in particular severely limit Hollywood’s access to the Chinese market. However, because the government has a monopoly on film distribution and receives nearly half […]
Enhanced versus Traditional Indexation for International Mutual Funds: Evaluating DFA, Wisdom Tree and RAFI PowerShares
By Heehyun Lim This paper uses stye analysis to compare the performance of traditional international index funds and enhanced international index funds. It attempts to measure the value added beyond classic indexation by the consideration of fundamentals. By employing Sharpe’s style analysis, I formulate a synthetic portfolio composed of DFA traditional funds to imitate each […]
Foreign Aid Allocation and Impact: A Sub-National Analysis of Malawi
By Rajlakshmi De Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries for development economics. To augment past cross-country studies and randomized evaluations, this project data from Malawi is used in combination with multiple rounds of living standards data to predict the allocation and impact of health aid, water […]
Manufactured Housing Securitization
By Renan Cunha Through prices of manufactured homes rose in the 2000’s, demand fell dramatically because of the boom in the stick-built housing market. One of the stated goals of securitization is to increase the supply of credit and decrease the cost of lending to make borrowing accessible to more homeowners. This paper will study […]
Debunking the Cost-Shifting Myth: An Analysis of Dnamic Price Discrimination in California Hospitals
By Omar Nazzal Cost-shifting, a dynamic form of price discrimination, is a phenomenon in which hospitals shift the burden of decreases in government-sponsored healthcare reimbursement rates to private health insurers. In this paper, I construct a data set spanning 2007 – 2011 that matches financial metrics of California hospitals to hospital- and market-specific characteristics with […]
Race and Pollution Correlation as Predictor of Environmental Injustice
By Marissa Meir Environmental injustice is a theory that claims distributions of toxic, hazardous and dangerous waste facilities are disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. This paper empirically demonstrates an alternative cause of environmental injustice- that low-income minorities are less likely to receive sizeable enough loans to buy a house in a cleaner area. […]
