Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.), Franklin University, 2024, Business Administration

This qualitative exploratory case aimed to understand what businesses do when faced with economic conditions developed through a sports strike. The study delves into the strategies employed by successful hospitality business owners to navigate sports labor negotiation experiences. The researcher seeks to understand how these experienced small business owners have managed to survive and thrive despite the economic upheavals caused by work stoppages in sports. The key to this adaptation lies in neighborhood adaptability, economic impact, cultural framework structures, and contingency thinking using the theoretical aspects of Servant Leadership when economic development can disrupt typical economic activities. This study and its voice could contribute to the next time a sports labor negotiation impacts a city district's economic system or any economic system where an indirect business component is suddenly stopped or taken away. This research was a collective effort, not just about sports labor negotiations and seasonal expectations, but for hospitality leaders in the business industry, empowering them to face future challenges. Three category themes emerged from twelve semi-structured interviews: (1) Change in Operations, (2) Employee and Staff Developments, and (3) Patron Experience, which helped develop 12 sub-themes assist as a road map to adaptability in the change in a business culture or economic ecosystem. There were recommendations to move forward with another indirect area outside sports, such as travel or city development. Another identified research potential by opening the participation area or demographics from a neighborhood to a city or region.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, Economics

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in drastic decreases in global tourism, and Latin America, which has a relatively high reliance on the tourism economy, was especially affected in the immediate short run. In this paper, I look at the effects of tourism reliance on international border policy and the effects of border policy on two main forms of macroeconomic recovery. I find that countries in Latin America that were more reliant on tourism generally opened their borders more quickly, and that decreasing international travel restrictions is correlated with positive macroeconomic growth and GDP recovery. Moreover, I uncover evidence suggesting that a high reliance on tourism is positively correlated with recovery from Covid. I also find that decreasing international travel restrictions is correlated with a positive impact on employment. There was widespread concern that countries highly reliant on tourism would struggle to recover from Covid, but countries most reliant on tourism were quicker to open their borders, perhaps stimulating growth immediately following Covid. When testing for non-linear effects of border controls, I find evidence suggesting that optimal border controls may have existed just before the implementation of quarantining for new arrivals.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, Economics

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent government-enforced business shutdowns caused massive uncertainty for small businesses. In response to this, Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program. This program gave eligible small businesses a forgivable loan to cover payroll expenses with the goal of encouraging employee retention while not actively in business. The program sought to alleviate the negative employment effects of a recession, but in doing so may have supported inefficient businesses and prevented the adaptation of new technologies. In this paper I analyze the causal effect of the Paycheck Protection Program on changes in labor productivity during the recovery from the 2020 recession. I utilize community bank saturation as an instrument to study the dynamic effects of earlier loan receipt on changes in output-per-worker over time.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, Economics

Lotteries are an established source of revenue for state governments across the US. Following the 2018 SCOTUS ruling that allowed states to legalize sports betting, several states seized the opportunity to create an additional source of revenue via its legalization and regulation. I exploit the staggered nature with which different states implemented their respective legislation to analyze associated impacts on online lottery activity in Ohio, where neighboring Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia all legalized sports betting before the Buckeye state. Leveraging a rich dataset of online lottery transactions and a variety of difference-in-difference specifications, I study the impact of having the option of legal online sports betting on online lottery activity in Ohio. I present cross-sectional and time-series models to analyze my predicted effects, finding mixed interactions between online lottery games and the availability of online sports betting. Overall, my results suggest that the relationship between the two gambling “products” is driven by several other factors, observed and unobserved, beyond simply proximity to a jurisdiction where an individual enjoys a choice between online sports betting and online lottery games.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Chapter 1 investigates whether improved transit opportunities increase income of nearby residents by improving access to work opportunities. To explore this hypothesis, I employ a difference-in-differences model combined with matching to examine the effects of constructing a light rail transit line on median-household income for affected neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, Minnesota (Minneapolis and state capital St. Paul). I find increased income in "treated" neighborhoods and test whether that increase applies to "incumbent" residents (i.e., original residents pre-rail construction). The findings indicate a significant increase in median household income in neighborhoods close to the new transit line, as well as a decrease in the nonemployment rate, and some evidence of higher wages and longer working hours. I also appraise whether the new transit line led to gentrification, finding no evidence of either gentrification or neighborhood decline. These findings indicate that the increase in median-household income results from incumbent labor-market upgrading and supports the idea that improved transit access benefited many nearby residents. Yet, I find poverty rates are unchanged, suggesting that improved public transit is ineffective in helping the poorest, i.e., benefits are concentrated among those above the poverty line. Chapter 2 quantifies the effects of highways on labor productivity isolating the indirect effects through urban sprawl. Transport networks have significant impacts on human activity and are closely linked to urban development as a very important part of public investment. It is widely accepted that highways can reshape the city structure by expanding the city areas and by affecting urban sprawl. Those changed urban structures inevitably have effects on labor productivity. However, different directions of driving forces of highways on city development render their effects on productivity ambiguous. Most of studies only estimate an overall effe (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Public Policy and Management

Research into the financial and economic consequences of chronic illness tends to focus primarily on the patient with little appreciation for the ways in which households may moderate the effects or ways in which household members may also be affected by the adverse consequences. A fuller understanding of the effects of chronic illness allows scholars to better understand how households act as channels of risk mitigation and allows medical practitioners to treat patients more holistically and with better anticipation of the financial challenges that may limit the efficacy of their prescribed treatments. In this dissertation, I integrate the literatures and datasets from household finance and health economics to offer insights into the economic effects of chronic medical disease. I introduce the dissertation in Chapter 1 by outlining the frameworks through which I understand a paradox of households in the context of medical disease: by living in a household, one simultaneously insures himself against the possibility that a medical outcome may negatively affect areas of his life that extend far beyond his body, and yet he exposes himself to increased risk of an adverse event simply by living with others. The three essays of this dissertation are integrally related to this paradox. In Chapter 2 I study the financial consequences of the diagnosis of type II diabetes. I integrate electronic health records, consumer credit data, and administrative labor force data to consider a broader scope of potential effects of the onset of a debilitating and costly chronic illness. Using event study difference in differences models, I find that disease onset increases rates of delinquency on debt payments but has little observable effect on consumption. Increased delinquency on debt payments results in a small, though sustained, adverse effect on credit score. These effects are greatest for individuals over 65 years old at the time of diagnosis. I also find a marked decrease in l (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

My three essays are designed to explore household food security, food demand, and food waste. These three topics are related because understanding food demand and food waste can support achieving food security. This dissertation consists of three essays and explores critical dimensions of food economics and policy, emphasizing the intersection of social programs, consumer behavior, and waste management. The first essay evaluates the associations between Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and food security in rural Southeast Ohio, and also explores the relationship between SNAP participation and fruit and vegetable consumption. We use novel household-level data on food insecurity and SNAP participation in rural Southeast Ohio, collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. To correct for self-selection bias, we employ the nearest neighbor matching method to match treated (SNAP participants) and untreated (SNAP nonparticipants) groups on observable characteristics. We find that participating in SNAP is associated with a significant increase in the probability of being food secure by around 26 percentage points after controlling for primary food shopping patterns. We do not find any significant association between SNAP participation and estimated intake of fruits and vegetables. The second essay calculates local apple price premiums, estimates the elasticity of demand for local apples, and uses a structural model with the estimated elasticity to simulate the impacts of increasing demand for local apples on the price and consumption of local and undifferentiated apples. Consumers often perceive locally grown foods as fresher and of higher quality. The Farm to School (F2S) program significantly increases demand for local food commonly purchased by School Food Authorities (SFA) and provides a reliable market for local farmers. We employ SFA transaction data and data from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service to calculate the local apple price pre (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Economics

My dissertation explores the interaction between firm dynamics and financial frictions and its implication for aggregate dynamics. In Chapter 1, I study the efficiency of the U.S. corporate bankruptcy laws in the aggregate economy. To do so, I develop a general equilibrium heterogeneous firms model with endogenous bankruptcy choice and private information about firms' permanent productivity levels. According to current U.S. bankruptcy law, firms can choose from two bankruptcy options: Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. In the model, private information hinders the screening of firms' permanent productivity, and firms with low permanent productivity can be more likely to be reorganized and continue operations after filing for bankruptcy, compared to the case with perfect information. Combined with private information, Chapter 11 reorganization increases the fraction of firms with low permanent productivity. As a result, this channel reduces aggregate output by 1.9\% in the economy with fixed wage. However, the lower equilibrium wage reduces the bankruptcy rate, increases firms' production, and restores the declined aggregate output in the general equilibrium. Lastly, as a source of business cycle fluctuations, I consider uncertainty shocks that raise the volatility of firms' idiosyncratic productivity and negative TFP shocks. The volatility effect of the shock makes lenders more uncertain about firms' types and increases the reorganization rates of firms with low permanent productivity. Even though the fraction of firms with high permanent productivity declines, the overall loss of aggregate output is quantitatively small because of the higher total production of firms with low permanent productivity. In addition, the negative TFP shock has a quantitatively small difference in an economy with and without private information. This is because the TFP shock evenly reduces the profit of firms with high and low permanent productivity. As a result, the ra (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Economics

This dissertation consists of two chapters that examine macroeconomic implications of heterogeneous responses of the agents in the economy. The first chapter answers the following question: Will reduced wages of young households during a recession have lasting impacts on their house purchases along the housing ladder? Previous papers studied whether reduced asset prices could benefit young households during the Great Recession, but little attention has been paid to how their housing wealth accumulation process was affected. This paper complements the literature by adding a new channel of a housing ladder along which households upgrade or downgrade their housing quality among rental units, small owner-occupied houses, and big owner-occupied houses. I answer the question by developing a quantitative overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous households in age, liquid assets, housing status, and defaultable mortgages. The housing ladder affects the composition of housing types of different age groups in the dynamic analysis. Lower interest rates facilitate house purchases by offering cheaper mortgages during a recession. However, adversely impacted wage levels and financial constraints discourage young renters from purchasing small houses by causing congestion on the housing ladder. On the other hand, small house owners face lower returns on savings, wages, and home values that obstruct their housing upgrade, hence the supply of small houses. A fall in house prices has a general equilibrium effect that relaxes the financial constraints and provides easier access to homeownership, but the income effect from suppressed wages dominates. As a result, young households with little savings and scarred wages experience a continuously low homeownership rate after a recession compared to a counterfactual economy without a recession. The second chapter studies how government fiscal policies propagate through different structures of the input-output network in a two-s (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Economics

In these essays, I uncover the nature of firm-level heterogeneity and quantify the macroeconomic effects of such heterogeneity using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the first chapter, "Propagation of Energy Shocks in an Integrated Banking Network," I study the impacts of the recent energy price shock resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war on Europe's real economy and banking sector. To this end, I develop a model of energy-importing countries with varying energy intensities, where financial intermediaries are interconnected through firms' working capital loans. Two potential sources of inefficiency are identified within this framework. First, due to the interconnectedness of banks across borders through shared customers, suboptimal equilibria may prevail, leading to excessive financial constraints on banks and a reduction in aggregate output. Second, given the energy price hikes, the initial distribution of net worth across banks may not be ideal. I show that a well-designed reallocation of net worth towards banks that supply firms with the lowest exposure to energy prices can mitigate financial distress effectively. In the second chapter, "R&D, Idiosyncratic Distortions, and Productivity," I examine the magnitude of these effects when idiosyncratic (firm-specific) distortions not only affect the allocation of resources but also influence firms' incentives to improve productivity. To this end, I develop a heterogeneous firm model where the evolution of firm-level productivity is endogenized by allowing firms to engage in risky R&D projects each period. The results show that, when distortions are tied to productivity, firm-level innovation plays a key role in generating substantial cross-country differences by amplifying the decline in aggregate productivity and consumption.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Economics

This dissertation consists of two essays on capital investment behavior in small open economies prone to sovereign default risk, using quantitative sovereign default models. These essays address two interrelated questions: first, the impact of the private sector's investment on sovereign default decisions, and second, the effect of sovereign default risk on the market value of firms as a measurement of sovereign default costs. The first chapter examines the impact of domestic investment by the private sector on sovereign default decisions and the extent to which sovereign default risk constrains domestic investment decisions. In this chapter, I propose the quantitative small open economy model with an interaction between sovereign default risk and capital accumulation by the private sector. I find that the private sector's investment decisions affect capital accumulation and sovereign default risk through two channels: the externality and farsighted investment. The externality may lead to under-accumulation of capital, but the farsighted investment would result in over-accumulation compared to centralized investment by the sovereign. Since the farsighted investment channel is dominant in my quantitative results, capital investment by the private sector could lower default risks and increase the welfare of the economy by 1.03%. In the second chapter, I examine how sovereign default risk influences firms' valuations as a measurement of sovereign default costs by developing a quantitative small open economy model with sovereign default risk and capital accumulation. I construct event studies based on the 2001 Argentina sovereign debt crisis and the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court legal ruling on Argentina's defaulted bonds. The model partially succeeds in replicating dynamics around default events, including the decrease in the domestic equity price. However, the news about increased sovereign default risk has a small effect on the market value of firms, which differs fr (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2024, Levin College of Public Affairs and Education

When designing fare structures, transit agencies are primarily concerned with generating revenue. They must however adhere to social justice goals set by transit governing bodies. Considering that travel is a derived demand, equitable access to public transportation enhances accessibility to desired destinations, especially for transit-dependent households. This three-essay dissertation addresses selected research questions in current transit pricing literature. The first essay examines the potential implications of fare capping policies for low-income transit users. The findings indicate that the introduction of monthly fare caps reduces total monthly fare expenditure among Extremely-Low-Income (ELI) riders and increases the likelihood of ELI riders earning unlimited monthly rides. The second essay explores how distance-based fares (DBF), compared to flat fare, potentially alters the travel expenditure of transit riders. This research finds that ELI riders experience significantly lower fare spending under a DBF system compared to a flat fare structure. The third essay tests current methodologies of extracting geodemographic information from mobile fare payment data. The findings show that land use type and the concentration of employment and housing in a neighborhood are significantly associated with the accuracy with which the residential locations of transit users can be inferred from mobile fare payment data. The analyses conducted in this dissertation are based on transit user activity data and survey data from a three-year federal grant led by NEORide, in partnership with multiple agencies in Ohio and Northern Kentucky. The research findings offer valuable insights into the current landscape of transit pricing and mobile fare payment technology in the United States.

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2024, Levin College of Public Affairs and Education

This dissertation investigates the restructuring process of regional economic development in US metropolitan areas through detailed analyses of the persistence of traditional technological innovations and their complex interplay with high-tech innovations. The dissertation is structured into three interconnected essays that address key issues: the sustainability of innovation in traditional fields, the impact of regional knowledge structures around traditional fields on high-tech innovation, and the potential for high-tech innovation capabilities to foster innovation in traditional fields. The first essay examines whether regions historically specialized in traditional technological fields can sustain innovation in these fields amidst stagnant population and economic growth. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that economic and population declines necessarily lead to diminished innovation, the findings reveal the enduring significance of traditional technological innovation for regional economies. The second essay investigates how diverse knowledge structures surrounding traditional fields can bolster a region's capacity to innovate within high-tech fields. This chapter highlights that, regions with a broader mix of patenting activities across both related and unrelated traditional technological sub-categories tend to exhibit higher innovation growth in high-tech fields, thereby demonstrating a stronger capacity for economic restructuring. Conversely, a high level of specialization in patenting within specific traditional sub-categories may hinder a region's ability to restructure effectively. The third essay assesses the potential for robust innovation capabilities in high-tech fields to enhance innovation in traditional fields. This notion challenges the traditional linear perspective of technological progression from traditional to high-tech fields. The results suggest instead a relationship where strong high-tech innovation capabilities stimulate inn (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2024, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

Conflicting theories, a looseness of concepts, mixed empirical results and recent trend data muddle the nature of the relationship between inequality and economic growth. Using a common reduced form regional growth model framework, an expanded geographic classification of counties, additional years of data, a trio of income inequality metrics and multiple empirical specifications, this analysis confirms and builds upon the notion that the relationship varies across geography. A positive relationship between an income Gini coefficient and per-capita income growth is only observed in central metro counties with population densities greater than 915 people per square mile or in about 5 percent of all counties, whereas previous research found a positive relationship in all metropolitan counties (27 percent of counties) and a negative in nonmetropolitan counties. Where inequality is in the distribution is also shown to impact this relationship. Inequality in top and bottom half of the income distribution both have a positive relationship with growth within this 5 percent of counties. However, in most locations (the other 95 percent of the counties), inequality in the bottom half of the income distribution either has a no statistical relationship or a positive one with growth while inequality in the top half of the income distribution tends to have a negative one. These patterns are relatively stable overtime but tend to not be robust to the inclusion of county fixed effects. These results provide some evidence that the mechanisms explaining how this relationship varies across place are more associated with agglomeration and market incentives, than social cohesion. The notion that place matters also implies that there is a need for smaller-place based organizations and greater coordination across systems to navigate issues related to increasing income inequality and growth. This research highlights the need for a robust research agenda focused on further refining the (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2024, Civil Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

Most research findings in the past have been inconclusive about the strength of the relationship between transportation investments and the national or state economy. In addition to this, there has been a plethora of arguments regarding the significance of positive relationships in a developed nation that already holds a well-connected and efficient transportation system. While the national and state-level impact of transportation has been questionable, most research agrees with the positive significance of the localized and redistribution impacts. Although economic development remains one of the important goals in the transportation planning process, the State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) struggle to find a simpler methodology to quantify the impact of transportation investment at the state level. Using time-series cross-sectional data from 19 peer states including the state of Ohio from 1970-2020, this thesis analyzed the significance of the relationship between highway capital outlay as well as annual road mileage added and economic development indicators of real GDP, real PCI, total employment, and population to develop a regression model. Furthermore, a case study was conducted for the state of Ohio to discern the impact of highway investment on its economy using time-series data from 1970-2020, as well as to observe the redistribution of the economy from 2000 to 2020 by the National Highway System (NHS) across the Ohio Counties. The research findings suggested that while highway capital outlay had a weak positive but significant relationship with economic change parameters among peer states, it was insignificant in the case of the state of Ohio. Additionally, the annual road miles added to the existing transportation system had no significant impact on any of the economic parameters except population change. The regression models developed with highway capital outlay as a predictor variable explained less than (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

In this dissertation, I model household behavior with respect to incentives and natural resources, with the goal of understanding the effects that individual's decisions have on their environment, and how the benefits of natural resources accrue to households. In my first chapter, I develop a spatial model of cattle ranchers responses to wolves and model their response to exogenous payments. Effective payments for conservation are an important tool to provide transfers between those who derive utility from wildlife and those who bear the economic costs in order to reduce poaching and promote coexistence. I build upon previous models to consider how these payments should be applied over space when farmers face heterogeneous depredation risk and thus heterogeneous incentives to poach wildlife. I find that while ex-post payments induce higher stocking rates as suggested by the previous literature, the effect is small compared to the ex-ante payment level needed to push farmers into the corner solution of zero poaching via ex-ante payments. I compare commonly used uniform ex-post compensation to spatially targeted compensation, finding that poaching can be reduced further by targeted payments given a limited government agency budget, and that, if ex-ante payments can be targeted, both types of payments can reduce poaching with similar costs. This work contributes to the literature on impact evaluation for payments for ecosystem services to promote conservation by considering spatial heterogeneity, and is the first to combine spatial risk mapping with farmer response to conservation payments. This work has important implications for the design and implementation of payments for conservation. In my second chapter, I quantify the effect of forest cover in mitigating acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in rural children in India. Acute respiratory infections, dependent on both indoor and outdoor air quality, have serious effects on the long-term well being of children. (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Public Policy and Management

How government delivers public services can have broad societal effects, beyond the impact on programmatic outcomes. Such societal effects are particularly likely in the delivery of public education, as educational concerns drive residential and school choices, and public schools are the second largest public employer in the United States. My dissertation explores how innovations in the way we administer public education may affect societal inequities by race, gender, academic ability, and socioeconomic status. The first essay examines how the emergence of online “virtual” public schooling, which families within a state can access regardless of where they live, has affected school-based segregation by race and poverty. The second essay examines the impact of the sudden closure of a large virtual charter school on district segregation by race and academic ability. Finally, the third essay estimates the impact of introducing teacher collective bargaining—which empowers teachers in the management of public schools—on the diversity of staff and employment and pay of women. Overall, this dissertation explores how education administration affects with whom students interact in school and who has access to quality public sector jobs—all of which, in turn, have well documented long-term impacts on children.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Consumer Sciences

Risk preference plays a central role in determining the financial and social well-being of individuals and households. In the three studies of this dissertation, I explore whether individuals' risk preferences over wealth and/or health vary systematically with exogenous changes in general education, particular education types, and health status. The analysis is also informed by recent empirical evidence that genetic differences across individuals are associated with socio-economic characteristics and behaviors. In Chapter Two, I explore the association between general education and risk preference over wealth. The study modifies a theoretical framework to introduce a mechanism through which education is associated with risk preference. Results indicate the existence of the association between education and calculated risk preference over wealth, but do not support the hypothesis that the relationship is causal. In Chapter Three, I introduce a more nuanced measure of education, specific majors/types of education, that aligns more closely with the theoretical construct. I employ local labor market statistics as instruments to predict individuals' choice of college major, discovering that students in math-related fields generally report being less risk-averse. Chapter Four transitions to exploring health status as another potential determinant of risk preference. I question whether risk preferences are consistent across domains and how these preferences shift with changes in health status. Using an instrumental variable approach and an over-identification strategy based on genetic variation associated with nine health conditions, I find that individuals with poorer health report being more risk-averse in health-related decisions but less so in other domains. Additionally, I observe that those with deteriorating health are more likely to be a drinker but less likely to be a smoker; for current users, consumption of both goods decreases as their health worse (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Stated preference (SP) methods such as Contingent Valuation (CV) and Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) appear widely across disciplines to estimate the economic value for both market and non-market goods/services. To ensure the validity and reliability of SP studies, one key assumption is that respondents' stated decisions can truthfully reflect their underlying preferences in a consistent and stable manner. However, this assumption can be violated by the existence of hypothetical bias (HB) often associated with a hypothetical choice environment, as well as ordering effects (Penn and Hu, 2018; Day et al., 2012). HB describes the divergence between individuals' responses in hypothetical valuations, often in the form of a survey, and revealed behaviors in the real market. One reason HB can take place is when there are no actual payment consequences, some respondents may not feel obligated to answer the survey questions seriously, and sometimes they may even behave strategically to influence the outcome of the survey. We refer to these responses as unqualified as the respondents deviate from the survey instructions. Researchers typically disqualify these responses from entering the final data for analysis. However, there are many types of unqualified responses. Subsequently, two issues may follow. First, a universal approach to purging all possible unqualified responses does not exist. Second, given a specific type of unqualified behavior, there is rarely agreement on what the threshold researchers need to rely on to define what responses are unqualified. Therefore, the first chapter explores the overlaps between three common types of disqualifying behavior (protest, inconsequentiality, and inattention) to see whether such overlaps are large enough thus enabling one common measure to clean all three types of unqualified responses. This chapter further examines whether different combinations from different definitions or thresholds used to capture unqualified response (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, Economics

Economists have long recognized the importance of agriculture and the US has undertaken many policies aimed at supporting the nation's agriculture industry. A grassroots effort to educate youth on agriculture began with the founding of 4-H, a youth development organization. In this paper, I investigate whether exposure to youth agricultural education impacts workforce outcomes using newly digitized, county-level data on enrollment in 4-H. Using linked census data, I find that living in an area with high exposure to 4-H makes children more likely to become farmers. I conduct additional analysis on the interaction of farming and 4-H, finding that 4-H exposure is twice as impactful on children of farmers.