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Category Archives: 2015

Women’s Land Rights and Empowerment: Impact of the Land Tenure Regularization Reform (LTR) on Contraceptive Use and Domestic Violence in Rwanda

by Winnie Biwott Abstract  The Rwandan Land Tenure Regularization reform (LTR) was implemented in 2007 to clarify land ownership in the country especially for women. Specifically, the reform enabled women in married unions to obtain joint titles with their partners as proof of land ownership.  Using data from the 2010 Rwandan Demographic and Health Surveys […]

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The Professor and the Coal Miner: The effect of socioeconomic and geographical factors on breast cancer diagnosis and survival outcome

By Shelley Chen Previous studies reported that patients who live farther from cancer centers do not necessarily experience delayed cancer detection and shortened survival. However, the results are biased because of the incomplete observation of patient survival, which cannot be properly accounted for with the multivariable regression model. In this thesis, I isolated the effect […]

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Deterring Ineffcient Gambling in Risk-Taking Agents

By Ryan Westphal This paper proposes a model describing the incentive issues faced by principals and agents when the agent has limited liability and is capable of undertaking unidentifiable, inefficient risky behavior. We propose a contract structure by which the principal deters risk by deferring payment to the agent until she reaches an absorbing steady-state […]

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Medicare’s Prospective Payment System: Do Differences in the Reimbursement Rate Affect Quantity of Care Delivered and Hospital Billing Practices?

By Russell Hollis When the government changes Medicare policy, payment structures often accommodate the change through lowering reimbursement rates. Changes in reimbursements raise the question of what effect changes have on patient care. Using data sets from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, I examine the diagnosis of major replacement or reattachment of the […]

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Google Search Volume Index: Predicting Returns, Volatility and Trading Volume of Tech Stocks

By Rui Xu This paper investigates the efficacy of using Google Search Volume Index (SVI), a publicly available tool Google provides via Google Trends, to predict stock movements within the tech sector. Relative changes in weekly search volume index are recorded from April 2004 to March 2015 and correlated with weekly returns, realized volatility and […]

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Understanding Financial Incentive Health Initiatives: The Impact of the Janani Suraksha Yojana Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Institutional Delivery Rates and Out-of- Pocket Health Expenditure

By Ritika Jain Demand-side financing is a policy tool used by nations to incentivize utilization of public institutions, and India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is one of the largest such financial incentive programs in the world. The program pays eligible pregnant women to deliver their babies in health institutions partnered with the program. This paper […]

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The Implications of Population Aging for Economic Growth a Regional Comparative Study

By Paige Muggeridge I use a reduced form regression model to determine the extent to which population aging accounts for economic growth in each of the nine regions of the world. Predominantly, I build upon the research of Bloom et al. (2010), which is central to formulating my regression equation. I separate the difference between […]

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The New Landscape of the NBA: The 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement’s Impact on Competitive Balance and Players’ Salaries

By Nicholas Yam The National Basketball Association (NBA) passed a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in 2011 that introduced many changes to the structure of the league. The purpose of those changes was to improve competitive balance among the league, allowing smaller market teams to better compete with larger market teams. Many of the changes […]

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Inflation Volatility and Economic Growth: A Disaggregated Analysis

By Nicholas Becker Inflation volatility has been theorized to negatively affect real economic growth, but empirical analyses have returned somewhat mixed results. Constructing my own dataset of household group inflation rates by disaggregating and linking Consumer Expenditure Survey data with Consumer Price Index data, I analyze inflation volatility and economic growth from the ground-up. Calculating […]

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How does being a Serial Creator affect Probability of Campaign Success on Kickstarter?

By Minn Khine This paper seeks to address the issue of how being a serial creator impacts campaign success on Kickstarter. My hypothesis is that being a serial creator – someone who has created 2 or more projects on Kickstarter – has a positive effect on probability of campaign success but there are diminishing marginal […]

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Questions?

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

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