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Category Archives: 2014

Marijuana Pricing Structure and State-Level Price Determinants

By Rebecca Li

This study uses the PriceofWeed.com data set first examined in Thies (2012) to analyze the price-quantity relationship for marijuana transactions and to determine the effect of various state-level factors on marijuana prices. By applying the cost-based full fixed cost recovery pricing model developed by Britney, Kuzdrall, and Fartuch (1983), this paper finds support for an inverse price-quantity relationship for marijuana rather than a logarithmic or linear relationship. User-rated quality is robust and significant across all models, and price-quantity discount elasticity of -0.220 is observed empirically. An analysis of state-level legal, demand-side, and supply-side determinants of marijuana price demonstrates that medical marijuana has a negative relationship with price, perhaps due to the reduction in risk faced by suppliers when medical marijuana is legalized.

Honor’s Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Michael Munger, Phil Cook | JEL Codes: D04, I18, K42 | Tagged: Marijuana, Price, Quality, Transaction Size

The effect of Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Migration Decisions

By Aki Ishikawa

The Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, is commonly overlooked for long-term evaluations. One understudied effect of this poverty-reduction program is the change in migration behavior caused by the cash transfers. Using data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, this study outlines the effects of the social net program on international migration of low-income households in Mexico. The results suggest that the program causes a positive increase in likelihood for international migration for program participants. Within participating households, individuals who are responsible for grant income tend to migrate less compared to the other members of the households. This research provides valuable insight into existing literature on migration of low-income households in relation to the availability of the conditional cash transfer program.

Honor’s Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Charles Becker | JEL Codes: R2, R23, R28 | Tagged: Conditional Cash Transfer Program, Developmental Economics, International Migration

The Impact of Greek Affiliation on Grades and Course Selection

By Andrew De Donato

We seek to understand how affiliating with a Greek organization impacts both grades and course selection. This research provides a novel addition to the literature due to a unique situation at the sample university, in that the first opportunity for freshmen to join Greek organizations occurs in the spring semester rather than the fall, as is more common. This situation allows us to control for otherwise unobserved characteristics that may be common to those who affiliate with Greek organizations. For men, joining a Greek organization is associated with a .07 point decrease in the grade received for an average class, while, for women, it is associated with an increase of .02 points in the fall semester and a decrease of .06 points in the spring semester. Joining a Greek organization is also associated with a decrease in the difficulty of selected courses, such that the average course selected provides grades that are .03 points higher than the average course, controlling for enrolled student characteristics.

Honors Thesis

Advisor: Michelle Connolly, Peter Arcidiacon | JEL Codes: I, I21, I23, I24 | Tagged: Course Selection, Fraternity, GPA, Grades, Greek, Sorority

Corporate Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction in North American Construction Industry

By Gang Li

This paper seeks to explore the application of Altman’s bankruptcy prediction model in the construction industry by measuring its percentage accuracy on a dataset consisting of 108 bankrupt & non-bankrupt firms selected across the timeline of 1985-2013. Another main goal this paper is to explore the predictive power of an expanded variable set tailored to the construction industry and compare the results. Specifically, this measuring process is done using machine learning algorithm based on scikit-learn library that transforms a raw .csv file into clean vectorized dataset. The algorithm provides various classifiers to cross-validate the training set, which produces mixed statistics that favors neither variable set but provides insight into the reliability of the non-linear classifiers.

Honors Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Connel Fullenkamp | JEL Codes: C38, C5, G33, G34 | Tagged: Bankruptcy, Corporate, Discriminant Analysis, Distress, Machine Learning

High Occupancy Toll Lines: Do They Reduce Congestion?

By David Wang

In 2009, according to data from the American Community Survey, ninety percent of workers in the U.S. used a privately owned vehicle when commuting. For an average commuter, the annual traffic delay in urban areas has increased from below fifteen hours in 1982 to more than thirty-five hours in 2007 (Winston, 2013). Furthermore, the annual cost of congestion, including travel delays and fuel expenditures, exceeds $100 billion a year (Winston, 2013). From a welfare standpoint, these travel delays cause a total welfare cost of $45 billion a year (Langer, Winston, & Baum-Snow, 2008). Governments have considered a variety of solutions to combat this congestion, the most prevalent being high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes and congestion pricing, including high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes.
The federal government heavily encouraged the construction of HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes, passing the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. It was thought that the speed differential between HOV lanes and general-purpose (GP) lanes would lead drivers to switch to carpools, thereby reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and the amount of congestion. However, in practice, HOV lanes have not been very successful and single occupancy vehicle (SOV) users often complain about underutilized HOV lanes. These observations mirror transportation researchers’ criticisms of the ineffectiveness of HOV lanes in reducing congestion. Dahlgren (1998) argues that adding a GP lane to existing highways is more effective at lowering delay costs than adding an HOV lane.
Another strategy, congestion pricing, involves placing a price on using roadways to offset the social cost arising from such use. Under Vickrey’s theory, the charges should match the marginal social cost of each trip as closely as possible (Vickrey, 1963). In a standard highway with only GP lanes, the personal cost of traveling, in the form of the value of time, often does not equal the social cost imposed on other commuters on the highway. This scenario gives rise to a mismatch in incentives and to a tragedy of the commons. In actual application, few tolling schemes for congestion pricing exist. Since technology has made collecting tolls cheaper, the main challenge now is public resistance. Current implementations of congestion pricing include Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing system and U.S. HOT lanes.
High occupancy toll (HOT) lanes have potential as a politically feasible policy to improve utilization of HOV lanes and generate revenue. HOT lanes give solo drivers the option to pay a toll for use of HOV lanes. The HOT lanes help address several issues, for example balancing the load and reducing congestion by shifting some solo drivers from GP lanes to HOV lanes, giving drivers the option of traveling on less congested lanes, and generating revenue for highway operators (Poole & Orski, 2000). Many studies of HOT lanes use California State Route 91 as an example of a HOT highway and seek to model any welfare gains from its implementation (Liu & McDonald, 1998; Small & Yan, 2001). Opened in 1995, the SR-91 serves as a good case study because it was one of the first HOT operations in the U.S. The literature also explores the distributional effects of congestion pricing over the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, looking at a network of roads rather than a single one (Safirova et al., 2004). They emphasize that much of the benefit from HOT lanes comes from undoing the inefficiency created by existing HOV lanes. Safirova et al.’s study is one of few empirical ones in the literature. Nevertheless, theoretical models, such as that by Konishi and Mun (2010), could be used as a basis for future empirical studies. The economics literature covers welfare gains, but does not address empirically how the congestion reduction from HOV and HOT lanes has changed over time. Although theory may predict welfare gains in the short term, it is unclear what the long run effects may be. In this paper, we seek to examine the short-run effects of the conversion of HOV to HOT lanes on highway congestion.

Honors Thesis

Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: R41, R48 | Tagged: Congestion Pricing, HOT lanes, HOV lanes, Tolls, Transportation economics

The Determination of Newspaper Slant in Small Markets

By Jordyn Gracey

This paper takes the assertion, made by Gentzkow et al., that newspaper slant is primarily determined by slant as given. Both that paper and this one use Hotelling as a foundation. However, this paper considers what happens when the distribution of ideological preferences differs at national and county levels. This paper controls for the size of the market in which the newspapers are operating as well as for the make-­‐up of the county-­‐level population. Findings show that demand is a robust determinant of slant across market sizes and that supply-­‐side factors rarely have significant impact on slant. In the two cases where ownership does have an effect on slant, it is in regressions where the largest-­‐circulating newspapers have been dropped. We determine that if ownership is important it is when control is more centralized,if a newspaper is operating in a small market or if the owner chooses the slant before deciding which market to enter.

Honor’s Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: L2, L21, L4, L22, L25, L44, Y8 | Tagged: Firm Behavior, Conglomerates, Product Strategy

Undergraduate Education and the Gender Wage Gap: An Analysis of the Effects of College Experience and Gender on Income

By Kelsey Siman

Labor and education economists have long been interested in the link between undergraduate education and earnings. In addition, studies have addressed the connections between gender and college major and GPA, as well as between gender and income. This paper brings all of these together in order to show that college major choice does have a significant effect on earnings, and that this effect differs with gender and across majors. The results show that controlling for college major, ability measures, graduation year, and GPA can help to explain a majority of the gender pay gap. Finally, the thesis then utilizes the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition to break down the price and composition effect of undergraduate education on the gender pay gap.

Honor’s Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Arnaud Maurel, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: A22, J16 | Tagged: College, Gender, Income

Martin Bronfenbrenner: An Economist in the American Occupation of Japan

By Michael Potts

Martin Bronfenbrenner (1914-1997) was one of the last of a generation of generalist economists. His involvement in the U.S. Occupation of Japan changed his life and his career. This paper examines the mutually stabilizing relationship between his persona and his work in light of his experiences in Japan. Access to Bronfenbrenner’s previously restricted and unpublished autobiography archived in the Economists Papers Project at Duke University allows the author to reconstruct, from primary source material, some of the challenges faced by the individual, prewar-trained economist in navigating the postwar transformation of the economics discipline.

Honor’s Thesis

Advisor: E. Roy Weintraub | JEL Codes: B2, B31, N45, N95 | Tagged: U.S. Occupation of Japan, Economic Japanology: Martin Bronfenbrenner

The Economic Effects of Military and Non-Military Government Spending

By Patrick Royal

There has been substantial investigation into the influence of government spending in general on economic growth, unemployment, and inequality, but relatively little investigation into the relative effects of different types of spending.  This thesis attempts to separate the influence of military and non-military government spending on the economy.  As with many such investigations, it focuses on a single economy – that of the United States.  The results indicate that, dollar for dollar, military spending is just as effective as non-military spending at affecting unemployment, but much more effective at promoting short-term growth.  Neither type of spending has a strong impact on income inequality, suggesting that the primary determinants of that are not related to government spending.

Honor’s Thesis

Data Set

Advisor: Craig Burnside | JEL Codes: E1, E12, E62 | Tagged: Government Spending, Growth, Military

Market Dynamics and the Forward Premium Anomoly: A Model of Interacting Agents

By Evan Myer

This paper presents a stochastic model of exchange rates, which is used to explain the forward premium anomaly. In the model, agents switch between four trading strategies, and these changes drive the evolution of the exchange rate. This framework is meant to more realistically represent the important market dynamics of exchange rates, as we suspect these to be the cause of the forward premium anomaly. Our simulations of the model indicate two conclusions: (i) many of the statistical regularities observed in currency markets, including the forward premium anomaly, can be thought of as macro-level scaling laws emerging from micro-level interactions of heterogeneous agents, and (ii) the dynamics of estimates of the beta coefficient in tests of UIP are driven by perceived relationships between changes in interest rates and agents’ aggregate views on the value of the exchange rate, which we call the fundamental value. Section I presents an introduction to the topic and section II reviews the relevant literature. Section III provides the theoretical basis of the forward premium anomaly and our model, then the mathematical definition of the model. Section IV presents the results of a typical simulation which section V compares to relevant stylized facts of the currency markets. Sections VI and VII present our results and a conclusion of what we have drawn from the model.

Honors Thesis

Advisor: Craig Burnside | JEL Codes: G1,G13, G15 | Tagged: Exchange Rates, Forward Premium Anomoly

Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu