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- All Subjects: Economics
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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
This thesis was conducted to study and analyze the fund allocation process adopted by different states in the United States to reduce the impact of the Covid-19 virus. Seven different states and their funding methodologies were compared against the case count within the state. The study also focused on development of a physical distancing index based on three significant attributes. This index was then compared to the expenditure and case counts to support decision making.
A regression model was developed to analyze and compare how different states case counts played out against the regression model and the risk index.
This survey takes information on a participant’s beliefs on privacy security, the general digital knowledge, demographics, and willingness-to-pay points on if they would delete information on their social media, to see how an information treatment affects those payment points. This information treatment is meant to make half of the participants think about the deeper ramifications of the information they reveal. The initial hypothesis is that this information will make people want to pay more to remove their information from the web, but the results find a surprising negative correlation with the treatment.
Since the global financial crisis of 2007-8, interest in worker-cooperatives and alternative forms of organization has surged. Mondragon, located in the Basque region of Spain, represents the largest federation of worker-cooperatives around the world, consisting of 98 cooperatives and 143 subsidiaries, which earned a total revenue of $14.5 billion in 2019. While previous attempts to establish a similar model have historically reached limited success, Mondragon has achieved a unique balance of remaining economically viable, on the one hand, and staying true to its founding principles of democratic governance, on the other. This paper sets out to analyze the democratic structure and the cooperative culture at the heart of the Mondragon model, as well as the new type of human relationship that it fosters. In particular, this relationship is one in which individual well-being is bound up with communal well-being that avoids the antagonistic clash between the capital and labor.
Lithium ion batteries are quintessential components of modern life. They are used to power smart devices — phones, tablets, laptops, and are rapidly becoming major elements in the automotive industry. Demand projections for lithium are skyrocketing with production struggling to keep up pace. This drive is due mostly to the rapid adoption of electric vehicles; sales of electric vehicles in 2020 are more than double what they were only a year prior. With such staggering growth it is important to understand how lithium is sourced and what that means for the environment. Will production even be capable of meeting the demand as more industries make use of this valuable element? How will the environmental impact of lithium affect growth? This thesis attempts to answer these questions as the world looks to a decade of rapid growth for lithium ion batteries.
Emerging Information Technology, Storage and Evaluation within Healthcare: A Discerning IMT Analysis
Data Sources: I use the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 2000 to 2011. The NIS is a 20% sample of all inpatient claims. The Manhattan Institute supplied data on the availability of health savings accounts in each state. State PTR implementation dates were gathered by Hans Christensen, Eric Floyd, and Mark Maffett of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business by contacting the health department, hospital association, or website controller in each state.
Study Design: The NIS data was collapsed by procedure, hospital, and year providing averages for the dependent variable, Cost, and a host of covariates. Cost is a product of Total Charges within the NIS and the hospital’s Cost to Charge ratio. A new binary variable, PTR, was defined as ‘0’ if the year was strictly less than the disclosure website’s implementation date, ‘1’ for afterwards, and missing for the year of implementation. Then, using multivariate OLS regression with fixed effect modeling, the change in cost from before to after the year of implementation is estimated.
Principal Findings: The analysis estimates the effect of PTR to decrease the average cost per procedure by 7%. Specifications identify within state, within hospital, and within procedure variation, and reports that 78% of the cost decrease is due to within-hospital, within-procedure price discounts. An additional model includes the interaction of PTR with the prevalence of health savings accounts (hereafter, HSAs) and procedure electivity. The results show that PTR lowers costs by an additional 3 percent with each additional 10 percentage point increase in the availability of HSAs. In contrast, the cost reductions from PTR were much smaller for procedures more frequently coded as elective.
Conclusions: The study concludes price transparency regulations can lead to a decrease in a procedure’s costs on average, primarily through price discounts and slightly through lower cost procedures, but not due to patients moving to cheaper hospitals. This implies that hospitals are taking initiative and lowering prices as the competition’s prices become publically available suggesting that hospitals – not patients – are the biggest users of price transparency websites. Hospitals are also finding some ways to provide cheaper alternatives to more expensive procedures. State regulators should evaluate if a better metric other than charge prices, such as expected out-of-pocket payments, would evoke greater patient participation. Furthermore, states with higher prevalence of HSAs experience greater effects of PTR as expected since patients with HSAs have greater incentives to lower their costs. Patients should expect a shift towards plans that offer these types of savings accounts since they’ve shown to have a reduction of health costs on average per procedure in states with higher prevalence of HSAs.