Economics

Session I

Chloe Irwin, "A Call for TEK: Addressing Environmental Failures in Western Systems"

Western conservation and land management conventions possess structural failures that have resulted in reduced global biodiversity, natural resource exploitation, and ecologically destructive food systems. This report emphasizes the environmental costs of such gaps in western sustainability frameworks and highlights the methodologies of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as complementary solutions to unsolved ecological crises. This project recognizes TEK not as a supplement to western science but as a uniquely dynamic knowledge system developed through millennia of place-based observation and a relationship of reciprocity. It emphasizes the necessity of recognizing the rights and intellectual autonomy of Indigenous communities while advocating for a global shift toward co-management of lands and resources. The discussion of the feasibility and ethics of TEK and western science collaboration concludes the report. In conjunction with this report, an annotated bibliography foregrounds the featured Indigenous-led studies, employing western scientific citation conventions to amplify and enhance accessibility to indigenous scholarship. 

Student Major(s)/Minor: Economics Major

Advisor: Dr. Sarah Stafford

Session II

Nina Argel, "Where You Grow Up Matters: State Education Spending, Income Inequality, and Intergenerational Mobility

This study asks whether the relationship between parents’ and children’s incomes varies across U.S. states and whether differences in education spending and income inequality help explain this variation. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I examine 462 parent-child observations and estimate intergenerational income elasticity, a measure of how strongly adult children’s incomes are associated with their parents’ incomes. A higher elasticity indicates greater persistence of economic status across generations and lower economic mobility. The national analysis finds a statistically significant elasticity of 0.271, meaning that a 1% increase in parental income is associated with approximately a 0.27% increase in adult-child income. I then compare state-level estimates with education spending and income inequality. Neither factor significantly explains differences in mobility across states. These findings suggest that economic mobility varies geographically—highlighting the need to examine additional factors that may shape economic opportunity across generations.

Student Major(s)/Minor: Government and English Major

Advisor: Dr. Emily Moschini

Will Barmby, "A Computational Frameworkk for Expectation Formation in Macroeconomic Models"

The expectations of firms and households play an essential role in modern macroeconomic models. What economic agents believe will happen in the future determines how they will act in the present, changing the actual realized outcomes. This project investigated how departing from traditional assumptions about the rationality and knowledgeability of households and firms affects the variability of key macroeconomic variables, such as inflation and output. In particular, I compared a model without monetary policy to a model with monetary policy. I explored multiple variations of adaptively learned expectations, where agents act as simple statisticians to forecast the future using past observations of the economy. While the  results of the particular comparison chosen during the course of this research did not differ significantly from existing findings in the literature, my approach to model comparison and experimental design constitute a useful computational methods contribution, allowing for greater ease of comparison between different macroeconomic models and different expectational assumptions.

Student Major(s)/Minor: Economics and Mathematics Major

Advisor: Dr. Nathaniel Throckmorton

Miles Hall, "On the Measurement of Gig Work and Unemployment Trends in United States"

The United States’ gig economy is comprised of millions of americans engaging in short-term work contracts. The gig economy includes freelance workers, independent contractors, and temporary workers. Through the 2010s, app-based gig platforms like Uber and Doordash have revolutionized how gig workers are connected with work contracts in the United States. This project compares different surveys and reports as a measure of gig economy participation in the United States, and relates those findings to the levels of unemployment and layoffs across several US states. Among the datasets compared are telephone surveys from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve, and the Upjohn Institute, as well as IRS tax data. This project finds that there is little correlation between these measures of gig work. These findings also help contextualize how current measures of gig work overestimate or underestimate participation in the gig economy, which has implications for those measures’ usage in research and media.

Student Major(s)/Minor: Computational & Applied Mathematics & Statistics Major

Advisor: Dr. Abhiprerna Smit

Cosette Jo, "The Effectiveness-Support Gap: Reassessing Public Perceptions of Coercion in Vaccine Incentive Research"

The practical and ethical scope of incentivized policy used to influence private decision making is a complex issue. Incentivized vaccination is one prominent application, sparking debate over attitudes towards health and privacy as well as its effectiveness as a policy tool. Recent research on policy preferences suggests that public resistance due to concerns about coercion remains a significant barrier to implementation in spite of positive perceptions of incentive efficiency. This project reviews the current literature on incentivized vaccination and proposes modifications to analysis and survey design for two influential studies – one examining incentive effectiveness, the other attitudes towards them – with the aim of better determining how people classify and gauge coercion, the extent to which coercion so defined occurs, and the contributing factors to public evaluation. By proposing a framework that highlights how society weighs moral convictions and different measures of efficiency, this project seeks to contribute to an empirical inquiry into the inherent and contingent components of a controversial transaction in order to provide a clearer blueprint for vaccine incentive policy that supports more informed analysis.

Student Major(s)/Minor: Economics Major

Advisor: Dr. David Klinowski