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‘Conflict Minerals’ and the Dodd Frank Act – New Working Paper
Seemingly everyone knows about ‘conflict minerals’. They are probably in our phones and laptops—even some of our jewelry is made out of them. Almost everyone wants to make ‘conflict minerals’ a thing of the past. Despite having little to do with Wall Street financial reform, Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act implemented a reporting requirement…
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Mini-Summaries from MIEDC 2018
A couple weekends ago, my department (Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota) hosted the Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MIEDC). It is a smaller conference with tremendous quality of presentations. Despite this, many are not able to attend the conference or even all of the sessions. As a service to those interested, a few…
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[Book Review] Cents and Sensibility – Forthcoming in F&E
Over winter break this year I had time to read… books… not just journal articles for a change. It was nice. One book I read was, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. As someone who doesn’t spend enough time reading literary classics (or much fiction…
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The Impact of Christian Theology on Economic Outcomes
Religion, spiritual practices, and faith are easily observable factors in the daily lives of people almost anywhere in the world. This leads many to speculate and theorize about the role of religion in driving economic and social outcomes. Positive correlations abound between religiosity and a host of factors that may influence economic success. Correlation, however,…
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How Much Does the Cardinal Treatment of Ordinal Variables Matter? – New Working Paper
Concepts such as subjective well-being, satisfaction, happiness, trust, measures of quality, and even standardized test scores are all measured using an ordinal variable. This means that we know the rank of the response categories (e.g. a respondent reporting being “very satisfied” indicates they are more satisfied than if they had reported being “satisfied”), but we…
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[Presentation Slides] China’s One Child Policy
About a year ago I gave a presentation about China’s One Child Policy in my Economic Demography class. I willingly picked the topic, but only from a limited set. As such, I didn’t know a whole lot about China’s One Child Policy and really learned a lot while preparing for this presentation.
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The Costs of Secondary Migration – Forthcoming in JIMI
Long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with my research on refugee resettlement stretching back to 2014. I was in my first year in gradate school and working as a research assistant on a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture. I am pleased to announce that my last research output from that…
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DACA and Human Capital Investment Decisions
Economists love to repeat (over and over) that incentives matter. This leads to one way of examining differences in educational achievement by investigating differences in the return to education among different people. The logic goes as follows: If people like me don’t tend to land high-paying or satisfying jobs after completing some level of education,…
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Improving Refugee Resettlement Outcomes with Machine Learning and Big Data
We are in a time in history when the population of refugees and forced displaced people has perhaps never been larger. This, along with frustrating political stalemates regarding the root causes of humanitarian crises, suggests refugee resettlement as one salient way to reduce human suffering around the world. In the world’s top (3rd country) refugee…
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The Effect of School Vouchers on Spiritual Practices
A new working paper, by Daniel Hungerman, Kevin Rinz, and Jay Frymark, entitled, “Beyond the Classroom: The Implications of School Vouchers for Church Finances“, was just released via the NBER working paper series. Although the paper still needs to be peer reviewed, I think it provides valuable insight. Here is the abstract (emphasis added):