2018
This year five groups took part in Senior Project (professor Karam Kang). The first group looked at the impact of renewable energy policies on labor markets and found a small positive effect of the policies on employment in the renewable energy sector. A second group looked at Mexican migration. By looking at Mexican survey data, the group established a negative relationship between local homicide rates and female migration rates. A third group looked at real estate data from the Pittsburgh region. The group could determine that parcels of land sold by the city of Pittsburgh are sold at a discount relative to predominant market prices. The fourth group looked at healthcare. Their analysis focused on the health care reform in Massachusetts in 2006. The finding is that, while overall insurance rates increased post-2006, there was little increase in pre-emptive health screenings. The fifth group also focused on healthcare. The goal of this group is to determine what drives a hospital network to adopt a telemedicine initiative. The main finding is that telemedicine is more prevalent in urban centers and in nonprofit hospitals.
This year, students in Financial Crises and Risk (professor Zetlin-Jones) completed group presentations that provided both macro and micro perspectives on the causes and consequences of failures in financial markets. On the broader side, one group emphasized the macro implications of problems in financial markets by studying the consequences of Too-Big-To-Fail policies, while another considered the macroeconomic consequences of Great Depression-era bank runs and panics. A third group emphasized the importance of informational asymmetries in understanding the problems that manifested in the mortgage market in 2007. Finally, the fourth group focused on understanding the reasons why many individuals receive limited or no insurance in health care markets.
The final group projects in Emerging Markets (professor Ales) focused entirely on North Korea. An obvious challenge when studying North Korea is the lack of data. The different groups tackled this limitation by comparing North Korea to other formerly planned economies. In doing so, several lessons emerged. One group emphasized how currently North Korea resembles Angola and Mozambique before their respective transitions from a planned economy. A second group determined the negative effects of transitioning from a planned economy too quickly. A third group looked at how capital inflows and government spending has been impacted in transitioning economies. Other groups looked at specific dimensions of the North Korean economy. The fourth group tried to determine the detrimental impact of large military spending on labor markets. The final group studied the impact of sanctions. The surprising finding is that, historically, sanctions have little or no effect on the targeted economies.