Journal of Undergraduate Research

Derek L. Hansen and Dr. Mark Showalter, Economics, A theory is only as good as the assumptions upon which it is based. Because of this, assumptions are constantly held up to the light to see if, in fact, they are genuine. In the field of Economics, several assumptions are made concerning the rationality of humans. […]

Karl N. Snow and Dr. Karl Diether, Economics Introduction Exchanged-based option trading began on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) in 1973. The American Stock Exchange (AMEX) and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange started trading exchange-based options in 1975, and the Pacific Stock Exchange (PSE) and the Midwest Stock Exchange (MSE) in 1976. Exchanged-based option trading […]

Robert Turley and Dr. James B McDonald, Economics Traditional methods for estimating economic relationships assume the error between their predictions and their observations to be normally distributed. In other words, the random variable representing the error term is expected to follow the Gaussian distribution popularly known as the bell curve. In the case of a […]

Ty Turley and Dr. B. Delworth Gardner, Economics Among economists, there is an ongoing debate as to what factors cause economic growth in developing nations, and what the relative strengths of these factors are. Sachs and Warner published an influential paper in 1995 reporting on a study that found “developing countries with open economies grew […]

Fernanda Sayavedra and Dr. Bret Mackay, Economics Poverty alleviation is one of the greatest policy challenges for Mexico. In the aftermath of the Mexican crisis of 1994/95, real per capita GDP fell sharply; employment in the formal sector declined as well as real wages. This led to a drastic increase in poverty at a national […]

Aaron Rogers and Dr. Bradford, Economics Up to the end of the Uruguay Round, textile and clothing quotas were negotiated bilaterally and governed by the rules of the Multifiber Arrangement (MFA). As GATT transmogrified into the WTO, a long-awaited uniform approach was arranged. On January 1, 1995, the WTO Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) […]

Aaron Howard and Dr. Bret Mackay, Economics Health Care costs have increased substantially over the past several years. Unfortunately, the cause of the increase is not well understood. The purpose of my research was to study and model the increasing premium trends of HMOs in an attempt to identify factors that contribute to the increasing […]

Mark J Jensen and Scott G. Murdock, Economics Abstract. In this paper we model inflation and the nominal interest rate as a fractionally integrated, autoregressive, moving average (ARFIMA) process in order to test the theoretical proposition that nominal interest rates move one for one with inflation, thus, leaving the real interest rates unchanged; i.e. the […]

Christopher Layton and David Hansen ABSTRACT This article reports the results of a three sample follow-up quantitative study involving 588 participants. Those sampled were students of three institutions of higher education, namely: Brigham Young University, Illinois State University and Texas Christian University. The three samples involved three different religious and non-religious affiliated institutions to evaluate […]

Tally Shae Payne and Dr. Clayne L. Pope, Economics In his study, “Education Among the Mormons,” Frederick S. Buchanan noted that “when we examine development of public schooling in Utah during the half century which elapsed between the initial settlement by Mormon pioneers in 1847 and the granting of statehood in 1896, it is not […]