Olivia Zitkus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- The changing legal landscape of the market for ancient art provides an opportunity to study the impact of legal constraints on economic markets. Working with novel data from Sotheby’s and Bonhams auction houses and court decisions from London and New York between 2003 and 2019, I look for the effects of legal rulings and settlements on the art market.
Kenneth Kitahata, Oberlin College -- This paper studies the personal characteristics and factors that determine alumni giving, using a dataset from Oberlin College’s Office of Development from years 1974 – 2019. Using Logit and Tobit regression, I find that females, graduates, older alumni, married alumni, alumni whose spouse attended Oberlin, and having a higher GPA in college are associated with higher giving.
Stephen Kisty, University of Pittsburgh -- This paper attempts to update the analysis that utilizes a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of increased availability of legal alcohol at age 21, caused by the minimum legal drinking age in the United States, on the consumption of marijuana (Crost and Guerrero, 2012).
Sarah von Bargen, Columbia University -- This paper analyzes the relationships between refugee and asylum seeker flows, unemployment rates, and suicide rates using both structural vector autoregression and dynamic panel models. Specifically, structural VAR is initially used for analyzing data from 1980-2018 in the United States, and a random effects dynamic panel model is utilized for analyzing post-2008 financial crisis data of these four variables in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.
By Ryan Pak, New York University Stern School of Business -- The decoy effect arises when a firm offers a product that is clearly inferior to another product in order to drive sales of the latter. This phenomenon has been displayed experimentally in many different situations, but remains understudied theoretically. We develop a model of almost rational consumer choice, with a single behavioral tendency — regret aversion.
By Aidan Acosta, Middlebury College -- Cap-and-trade has been shown by previous studies to be at least as effective as prescriptive regulation at reducing air pollution. However, regulators must ensure that the dispersion of emissions that is dictated by the market is environmentally just in order for cap-and-trade to be a viable solution.
By Smeet Butala, University of Maryland -- This paper examines the effects of increasing national coverage of All India Radio on financial inclusion during the early 2000s. Specifically, the dependent variable is bank account ownership and the explanatory variable of interest is subdistrict-level radio coverage.
