Matching Items (206)
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This thesis analyzes budgetary documents of the State of Arizona relating to education spending as well as East Valley school districts to examine the extent of reductions in state funding for K-12 education since the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Previous research has found that Arizona ranks in

This thesis analyzes budgetary documents of the State of Arizona relating to education spending as well as East Valley school districts to examine the extent of reductions in state funding for K-12 education since the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Previous research has found that Arizona ranks in the very bottom tier of states in education spending. Moreover, Arizona has cut per-pupil spending by a higher percentage than forty-seven other states. To assess the effects of these cuts, I determine both their magnitude in the aggregate as well as their significance to individual school districts. In the first chapter, I explain the school finance formula to provide a foundation for my analysis, scrutinize the last nine budgets of the Arizona Department of Education to measure annual changes in funding, chronicle the inflation-funding lawsuit to gauge the quantity of funds withheld, rather than cut, from schools, and sum the value of reduced and suspended funding to discover the total cost of these decisions. In the second chapter, I compile data from the budgets of East Valley school districts covering the last eight recorded years to discern and compare annual changes in revenue from the state, aggregate teacher salaries, and the number of teachers employed. Looking ahead, the conclusion discusses public opinion on education funding and the enacted budget for the coming fiscal year, FY 2016. In conjunction, these sections convey both a comprehensive history of the decisions made by our public officials that have affected public education in Arizona and an analysis of the consequences of those decisions.
ContributorsStumpf, Austin Robert (Author) / Herrera, Richard (Thesis director) / Jones, Ruth (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Public Affairs (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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According to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) will provide 26 million households with 60 billion dollars of reduced taxes and refunds in 2015 \u2014 resources that serve to lift millions of families above the federal

According to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) will provide 26 million households with 60 billion dollars of reduced taxes and refunds in 2015 \u2014 resources that serve to lift millions of families above the federal poverty line. Responding to the popularity of EITC programs and recent discussion of its expansion for childless adults, I select three comparative case studies of state-level EITC reform from 2005 to 2013. Each state represents a different kind of policy reform: the creation of a supplemental credit in Connecticut, credit reduction in New Jersey, and finally credit expansion for childless adults in Maryland. For each case study, I use Current Population Survey panel data from the March Supplement to complete a differences-in-differences (DD) analysis of EITC policy changes. Specifically, I analyze effects of policy reform on total earned income, employment and usual hours worked. For comparison groups, I construct unique counterfactual populations of northeastern U.S. states, using people of color with less than a college degree as my treatment group for their increased sensitivity to EITC policy reform. I find no statistically significant effects of policy creation in Connecticut, significant decreases in employment and hours worked in New Jersey, and finally, significant increases in earnings and hours worked in Maryland. My work supports the findings of other empirical work, suggesting that awareness of new supplemental EITC programs is critical to their effectiveness while demonstrating that these types of programs can affect the labor supply and outcomes of eligible groups.
ContributorsRichard, Katherine Rose (Author) / Dillon, Eleanor Wiske (Thesis director) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Herbst, Chris (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality in the United States and remains a great public health challenge. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors (e.g., unhealthy diet, sedentary behavior, cigarette smoking, and obesity) are associated with a greater risk of incident CVD and all-cause mortality. From the prevention strategy, maintaining

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality in the United States and remains a great public health challenge. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors (e.g., unhealthy diet, sedentary behavior, cigarette smoking, and obesity) are associated with a greater risk of incident CVD and all-cause mortality. From the prevention strategy, maintaining a healthy lifestyle throughout a lifetime is a key to CVD prevention. Nonetheless, the prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors in US communities is low as 3 to 5%. Moreover, the prevalence of a healthy population among college students remains unknown. Objective: We investigated the prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors among college students. Methods: We recruited 747 undergraduate students from Arizona State University using a survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire investigated demographic characteristics, body mass index, dietary habits, physical activity habits, and smoking habits. The chi-square test was used to investigate the frequency of ideal lifestyle behaviors in college students. Results: Prevalence of students who met all 4 ideal health behaviors (ideal cardiovascular health) is very low at 7.6%. Approximately 55.7% of students had only 2 or less ideal lifestyle behaviors (poor cardiovascular health). In addition, there were no statistical differences in combined ideal lifestyle behaviors across gender and different years of undergraduate studies. Conclusion: College students had a very low prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors. Increasing healthy low-risk students throughout college education is an important strategy to prevent chronic disease morbidity and mortality at individual and population level.
ContributorsConway, Jason Michael (Author) / Lee, Chong (Thesis director) / Angadi, Siddhartha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Technological advances in the past decade alone are calling for modifications to the usability of various devices. Physical human interaction is becoming a popular method to communicate with user interfaces. This ranges from touch-based devices such as an iPad or tablet to free space gesture systems such as the Microsoft

Technological advances in the past decade alone are calling for modifications to the usability of various devices. Physical human interaction is becoming a popular method to communicate with user interfaces. This ranges from touch-based devices such as an iPad or tablet to free space gesture systems such as the Microsoft Kinect. With the rise in popularity of these types of devices comes the increased amount of them in public areas. Public areas frequently use walk-up-and-use displays, which give many people the opportunity to interact with them. Walk-up-and-use displays are intended to be simple enough that any individual, regardless of experience using similar technology, will be able to successfully maneuver the system. While this should be easy enough for the people using it, it is a more complicated task for the designers who are in charge of creating an interface simple enough to use while also accomplishing the tasks it was built to complete. A serious issue that I'll be addressing in this thesis is how a system designer knows what gestures to program the interface to successfully respond to. Gesture elicitation is one widely used method to discover common, intuitive, gestures that can be used with public walk-up-and-use interactive displays. In this paper, I present a study to extract common intuitive gestures for various tasks, an analysis of the responses, and suggestions for future designs of interactive, public, walk-up-and use interactions.
ContributorsVan Horn, Sarah Elizabeth (Author) / Walker, Erin (Thesis director) / Danielescu, Andreea (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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This report will provide an analysis of frontier market equity-based investment funds with respect to bivariate correlation analysis, global integration analysis, and US optimized portfolio statistics. My analysis has indicated strong diversification benefits of including frontier market equities in a US portfolio, given its low correlation to US equity concentrated

This report will provide an analysis of frontier market equity-based investment funds with respect to bivariate correlation analysis, global integration analysis, and US optimized portfolio statistics. My analysis has indicated strong diversification benefits of including frontier market equities in a US portfolio, given its low correlation to US equity concentrated portfolios especially portfolios that would consist of midcap and smallcap stocks. With the drawbacks of the bivariate correlation test, an additional global integration analysis has been included to reaffirm the value frontier markets offer in the form of integration. Integration is a second layer of the diversification analysis. I find that when analyzing frontier markets (FM) against developed markets (DM) there exhibits significantly less integration as compared to emerging markets against developed markets. This analysis goes one step further and quantifies integration of specific frontier market funds against the broader emerging and developed markets. This study finds that iShares MSCI frontier 100 ETF (Ticker: FM) exhibits the least integration amongst Guggenheim Frontier Markets ETF (Ticker: FRN), Templeton Frontier Markets A (Ticker: TFMAX), and Morgan Stanley Frontier Emg (Ticker: MFMIX). Lastly, this analysis covers the inadequacy with using Sharpe ratios and minimum volatility parameters to achieve portfolio optimization under a Monte-Carlo style 1000 portfolio simulation with frontier market funds in a broader US equity portfolio but finds better results when using a US equity and US bond combination portfolio. Overall, this analysis of frontier markets and frontier market funds has shown there still exists significant diversification benefits to US Investors when they engage in FM investments, specifically through diversified FM investment funds.
ContributorsHardy, Gunner Laine (Author) / Pruitt, Seth (Thesis director) / Brada, Josef (Committee member) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Students in an online course can face diminished incentives to exert effort and focus without the structure of instructor-paced material. To introduce new motivation to spend more time with course material, this paper examines the use of A/B split test content experiments. One group of students is exposed to a

Students in an online course can face diminished incentives to exert effort and focus without the structure of instructor-paced material. To introduce new motivation to spend more time with course material, this paper examines the use of A/B split test content experiments. One group of students is exposed to a set of hidden hyperlinks ("Easter Eggs") within the course and earns trivially small amounts of course credit for finding them. While controlling for demographics and initial effort, finding each additional Easter Egg is associated with a 0.8 percentage point increase in final grade. This effect is even stronger for low performers: for those below the median grade before the first Easter Egg, each find increases final grade by 1.3 points. The treatment advantages low-performing students more than their high-achieving counterparts, thus helping to reduce the education gap at extremely low cost to course developers.
ContributorsWinseck, Kevin Lee (Author) / Hobijn, Bart (Thesis director) / Veramendi, Gregory (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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The United States Open Championship, often referred to as the U.S. Open, is one of the four major championships in professional golf. Held annually in June, the tournament changes venues each year and must meet a strict criterion to challenge the best players in the world. Undergoing an evaluation conducted

The United States Open Championship, often referred to as the U.S. Open, is one of the four major championships in professional golf. Held annually in June, the tournament changes venues each year and must meet a strict criterion to challenge the best players in the world. Undergoing an evaluation conducted by the United States Golf Association, the potential course is assessed on its quality and design. Along with this, the course is evaluated on its ability to hold various obstructions and thousands of spectators, while also providing plenty of space for parking, ease of transportation access, and a close proximity to local airports and lodging. Of the thousands of courses in the United States, only a select few have had the opportunity to host a U.S. Open, and far fewer have had the chance to host it on multiple occasions. Therefore, we are prepared to create the next venue that has the capabilities of hosting many U.S. Open tournaments for years to come.
ContributorsCostello, Alec (Co-author) / Miller, Alec (Co-author) / Foster, William (Thesis director) / McIntosh, Daniel (Committee member) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Gendered products are prevalent in the modern consumer products market. This paper provides historical context for the change in the consumer products market which started as a genderless product market and shifted to a female consumer-centric market reflecting the economic needs of the United States through World War I and

Gendered products are prevalent in the modern consumer products market. This paper provides historical context for the change in the consumer products market which started as a genderless product market and shifted to a female consumer-centric market reflecting the economic needs of the United States through World War I and II. This female consumer-centric market results from the rise of consumer research and many household products are created to satisfy female consumer preferences. But as the consumer demographics change with more women entering the labor force, the types of products being sold change to appeal to the increasing number of male consumers who begin shopping for themselves. This increase in male products is what leads to the booming men's personal care products market that we see today. With an increase in gendered products, there has also been an increase in the number of backlash companies face for creating specific gendered products. This paper outlines the history of gendered products and the potential future of products in the United States.
ContributorsLavergne, Lisa (Author) / Foster, William (Thesis director) / Goegan, Brian (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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DescriptionA compilation of creative non-fiction writings based on my travels an ASU undergraduate.
ContributorsLambourne, Allison Elizabeth (Author) / Scott Lynch, Jacquelyn (Thesis director) / Murphy, Patricia (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor)
Created2013-12
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While the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions are widely known, scholars and policymakers often assume these costs are geographically localized. This research questions these assertions by examining the relationship between economic sanctions and refugee flight. I argue that the imposition of sanctions produces refugees for two reasons. First, in the

While the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions are widely known, scholars and policymakers often assume these costs are geographically localized. This research questions these assertions by examining the relationship between economic sanctions and refugee flight. I argue that the imposition of sanctions produces refugees for two reasons. First, in the face of rising prices and stagnant wages, people are forced to leave in order to survive. Second, sanctions increase the level of state-sponsored repression, forcing refugees to flee political violence. The empirical results offer initial support for this theory and suggest that sanctions may promote a contagion effect that could have negative consequences for regional economic and political stability.
ContributorsTruax, Timothy Christian (Author) / Thies, Cameron (Thesis director) / Wood, Reed (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05