W&L Dept. of Economics
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This collection contains the scholarship of students in the W&L Dept. of Economics.
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Recent Submissions
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Combatant Composition and Peace Durability: A Historical and Empirical Dive into Rebel Group Fragmentation as a Determinant of Conflict Relapse
Nearly all regions of the world have observed repeated cycles of violence involving anti-state militias and domestic or international terrorist groups since the end of World War II. A 2020 UN Human Rights Office report on ... -
Watching Hate -- Social Instability as a Factor for the Presence of Hate Groups in US Counties (thesis)
Hate groups in the United States form a pressing problem and have been examined in quantitative economic and sociological research. In this paper, I analyze predictors of hate groups, particularly age-adjusted mortality ... -
A Survival Analysis on the Waiting Lists for Kidney Transplants in the United States: Who Waits the Most? (thesis)
The National Organ Transplantation Act, passed in 1984, continues to be utilized in an effort to address the disparity between the quantity supplied and demanded of kidneys. The National Organ Transplantation Act declared ... -
Are Board Gender Quotas Effective in the United States? Evidence from the California Senate Bill 826 (thesis)
This paper uses difference in difference and triple difference models to assess the relationship between gender quota mandates and firm performance. I use data from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which provides ... -
A Machine Learning Approach to Stock Selection using Technical Analysis (thesis)
This thesis introduces a novel machine learning framework for stock selection that only uses technical indicators and chart patterns as inputs. In contrast to other papers, the machine learning model first employs a recursive ... -
Energy Boom to Doom: The Impact of Fracking on Deaths of Despair (thesis)
Since 1999, 'deaths of despair' -- deaths from drug overdoses, alcoholic liver disease, liver cirrhosis, and suicide -- have driven increases in mortality for middle-age white Americans (Case and Deaton 2017). While the ... -
Does Exposure to Media Shape Perceptions of Corruption? Evidence from Post-Socialist Countries (thesis)
This paper empirically assesses the effect of exposure to media on individuals' perceptions of corruption, taking into account the heterogeneous effects of the extent of state control of media. Perceptions of corruption ... -
The Signaling Effect of Rankings: Evidence from Top 14 Law Schools (thesis)
This thesis examines the effect on career outcomes caused by placing within the top 14 spots on US News & World Reports' law school rankings. We use data from the American Bar Association on class profiles, Bar passage ... -
Examining the Mechanisms by which Women's Agency Affects Environmental Health: A Structural Equations Modeling Approach (thesis)
Though previous authors have consistently reported a positive relationship between women's agency and environmental health, a causal relationship between the two variables has yet to be identified due to the confounding ... -
Do Goods and Financial Market Frictions Explain the Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle? (thesis)
Feldstein and Horioka (1980) argue that in a world of perfect capital mobility, if one regressed investment on savings, the coefficient would be 0. When they found coefficients of between 0.87 and 0.91, they concluded that ... -
Automation and Family: Marriage, Divorce, and Fertility Rates (thesis)
I exploit variation in the job composition of US local labor markets to determine how automation affects familial outcomes from 1980 to 2019 and look at employment, marriage, divorce, and fertility rates as outcomes. ... -
The Effect of Preference for Sons over Daughters on Women's Agency and Empowerment Within a Household (thesis)
While studies have shown how son preference negatively affects life outcomes of both born and unborn daughters, there is limited research examining how it, in turn, affects women who do not give birth to the desired number ... -
Pleasure and Pain: The Connection Between Opioid Prescriptions and Social Security Disability Insurance in the U.S.
I examine the connection between prescription opioid use and Social Security Disability Insurance in the United States. Previous research has found that a correlation exists between opioids and disability rates, but little ... -
The Great Migration and Education: How African American Migrant Flows Impacted Northern Cities' Finance Decisions (thesis)
Ethnic fragmentation influences local preferences and the provision of public goods, such as education. I examine the effect of changes in racial composition for Northern and Western cities between 1940 and 1970 on city ... -
Recession Severity and Lagging Employment (thesis)
This paper uses the Current Population Survey to examine the differential experiences of demographic groups following the Great Recession. Geographic variation in recession severity is used to asses the effect of recession ... -
Social Identity and the Take-Up of Healthcare: Exploring the Intersection of Caste, Gender, and Public Policy in Nepal (thesis)
To reach equality in health outcomes, Nepal -- in concert with most developing countries -- has focused on the decentralization of healthcare. Although accessibility to health services is now relatively uniform, health ... -
The Effects of the Bracero Program (1942-1964) on Educational Attainment, Marriage, and Divorce in Mexico (thesis)
In this paper, I examine the effects of the Bracero program, which brought Mexican workers into the United States on temporary guest worker visas from 1942 through 1964. I build on Kosack (2019) which focuses on the effects ... -
Mothers Matter: Mother's Commitment to Children's Educational Outcomes in Ghana (thesis)
In Ghana, with rates of economic inequality increasing, the government has made numerous strides to combat the socioeconomic, gender, and locational discrepancies of educational enrollment and completion to develop into a ... -
Tell Me How I'm Supposed to Breed with No Air: Air Pollution and Fertility in the U.S. (thesis)
Exposure to air pollution during pregnancy is known to cause adverse infant health outcomes. However, less is known about the effect of pollution on fertility. In this paper, I use EPA air quality monitor data and NCHS ... -
Timber Harvests and the Opportunity Cost of Capital: Evidence from the US Southland (thesis)
The optimal timber rotation problem appears in many introductory environmental economics textbooks and has been a standard illustration of the relation between market rates of return and economic decision-making for decades. ...