The Long run Economic Effects of the Dustbowl Migration

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Julie Hollenbaugh and Joseph Price, Economics Introduction In this project we explore the long-run economic effects of the dustbowl migration on children in families that moved out of the Oklahoma dustbowl region in the 1930’s relative to children in families that stayed in the region. My primary contribution to this ongoing analysis was the creation […]

Implementation of Recurrent Neural Nets in Forecasting Macroeconomic Indicators

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Christ Rytting and Dr. Kerk Phillips, Economics Department Drivendata.org says “In the year 2000, the member states of the United Nations agreed to a set of goals to measure the progress of global development. The aim of these goals was to increase standards of living around the world by emphasizing human capital, infrastructure, and human […]

It’s No Accident: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Vehicle Safety Inspections

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Alex Hoagland, Trevor Woolley, and Dr. Lars Lefgren, Economics Department Introduction As technology improves, vehicle manufacturers have taken it upon themselves to make and distribute vehicles that are far safer and more reliable than in previous years. In fact, traffic fatalities are on a steep decline in the U.S., with a total of only 32,850 […]

The Implementation of a Basic Income Guarantee

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Parker Rogers and Dr. Kerk Phillips, Economics Department The purpose of this project was to model the implementation of a basic income guarantee, by repealing all existing government benefit programs and implementing a monthly lump sum transfer to all working individuals in the US economy; we repealed and implemented these policies using our model in […]

Is Loss Aversion Costing You Money?

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Tanner Eastmond and Dr. Joseph Price, Economics Department Introduction Loss aversion is a well-documented behavioral phenomenon originally proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (2013). The idea is that people value losses more than they do commensurate gains. Many researchers have examined the effects of loss aversion on an individual level, but many economists think that these […]

Investigating the Gender Gap in Grade Sensitivity for Economics Majors

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Brittany Farnsworth Russell and Dr. Eric Eide, Economics Department Introduction For my research I used institutional data from Brigham Young University as well as survey data from students to investigate the effect of gender and grade in Econ 110 on the probability of choosing economics as a major. This topic is of interest because the […]

Mid-Season Coaching Changes in the NBA

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Kenan Spruill, Adam Roberts, and Joseph Price, Department of Economics “When the going gets tough, we fire the coach”, this quote from former coach and current ESPN analyst Jeff van Gundy represents part of the current trend in sports. Management fires the coach in the hope that the new one can lead the team to […]

Dynamic Multi-Industry Firm Computational Model

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McArthur, Donald Rex Dynamic Multi-Industry Firm Computational Model Faculty Mentor: Rick Evans, Economics My ORCA Grant allowed me to spend my time building a Macroeconomic Tax Policy scoring model that was used in open source research with the Tax Policy Center. I used the money to fund my time coding and contributing to the project […]

EFFECTIVE MODELING OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

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Justin Gardiner and Richard Evans, Department of Economics Introduction Many macroeconomic models have trouble matching the high end of the distribution of wealth in the economy. To correct this problem, we set out to build a model that includes individual agents experiencing stochastic changes to their income levels. These stochastic changes thus model real life […]