Journal of Undergraduate Research

Christopher Palmer and Dr. Frank McIntyre, Economics Department This paper employs microdata from the 2001 Armenian National Census to consider how varying levels of higher education affect the likelihood that an individual is employed in Armenia. The analysis concludes that the effect of incomplete undergraduate education on employment status is not statistically different from the […]

Brad Larsen and Dr. James McDonald, Economics Qualitative response (QR) models are used by economists, biometricians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and others to estimate the effect of certain variables on a binary (“yes” or “no”) response. For example, economists use QR models to answer the question, “What factors influence a woman’s decision to work? For years, biometricians […]

Matthew Gee and Dr. C. Arden Pope III, Economics Department Exposure to elevated concentrations of ambient particulate matter (PM) has been implicated as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and mortality. Short-term elevated PM exposures and related inflammation may contribute to acute complications of atherosclerosis by accelerating the progression of atherosclerosis, and triggering plaque rupture. […]

Julia DeLong and Dr. Clayne Pope, Economics One of the more profound and far-reaching social transformations America went through in the latter half of the twentieth century was the growing replacement of married households by single (never married) and divorced households. While the sociological consequences of this transformation are generally debated, we seldom consider the […]

Riley Wilson and Dr. Joseph Price, Economics Research has consistently found that marriage is associated with a number of positive economic, social and health outcomes (Korenman and Neumark, 1991; Loh, 1996). However, despite the many observed benefits of marriage at a point in time, there is a general belief that economic outcomes will be even […]

David Gordon Introduction There is a vast body of literature that documents the seemingly irrational phenomena called loss aversion, a subset of prospect theory. Loss aversion is the idea that losses loom larger than otherwise equivalent gains, making it so that an agent would be unwilling to give up something currently in their consumption bundle […]

Taylor Canann and Dr. Richard Evans, Department of Economics Short-term consumer credit lenders, in particular payday, pawn, and car title lenders, are seen as lenders that prey on the weak of society. This study uses a two-stage negative binomial regression to examine the “chum in the water,” determinants of the locations, of these “loan sharks,” […]

Tyler M. Ransom and Dr. Richard Butler, Economics Research has shown that voters show partisanship—propensity to vote along party lines—in Presidential elections. My project explores whether a person’s religiosity, as measured by affiliation variables, has an impact on partisanship and vote choice. My coauthors and I develop a religious partisanship index (RPI) that gauges the […]

Bradley Hunter and Dr. Eric Eide, Economics Department Introduction Every semester, each of the fifteen teaching assistants for Economics 110 classes hold two weekly review sessions, during which they solve practice test questions, discuss the implications of lecture material, and help students solidify difficult concepts. These review sessions, while provided at a relatively low cost […]

Ian Filmore and Dr. Eric Eide, Economics While researchers have explored a wide variety of measures designed to improve student performance, the obvious issue of absenteeism has gone largely ignored. This is even more puzzling when we consider that most policy measures implicitly rely on the students’ physical presence in the classroom in order to […]