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Assessing the Impact of Tourism on Housing Price Dynamics: Evidence from Hawaii Highlighting Directional Causality and Vacation Rentals
Full text linkTourism has been shown to impact housing prices and residents’ ability to afford housing in a host community as well as impacting several other aspects of the host community. This study uses Hawaii as a case study to examine how tourism impacts housing price dynamics and whether there is a different distribution of effects across the different islands due to tourism levels including an aspect about short-term rentals and housing prices. Compiled datasets spanning from 2000 to 2023 of monthly data and from 2019 to 2023 (short-term rentals) OLS and 2SLS regression methodologies were employed to analyze the relationship between tourism (using two proxies: tourist arrivals and tourism expenditure) and housing prices and short-term rental and housing prices along with some GIS mapping. The results of this study support previous literature regarding the extent of the relationship between tourism and housing prices being endogenous variables and tourism having a positive statistically significant relationship with housing prices. There are many limitations to this study with many opportunities to expand this field of research. This research can help to inform policies geared towards tourism and the economic development of Hawaii and can be used to explore the economic well-being of local Hawaii residents
A Comparative Risk Analysis of Sportsbooks and Options Sellers
Full text linkBoth options sellers and sportsbooks are price-setters in growing speculative markets. With the increased availability of sports betting and options trading, potential inefficiencies in risk-taking behavior could be exposed in these markets. This paper serves to compare the risk taking behavior of sportsbooks and options sellers. Two proposed statistics were used to measure risk in these speculative industries. Risk premium, based on concepts from Arscott (2022) and Moskowitz (2021), measured risk from a per-dollar returns framework. Tail Risk Ratio is a novel addition to previous literature which compares the tail risk of sellers and buyers in speculative markets. The relationship between these two statistics was also explored. The findings of this paper show that options sellers take on significantly more risk than sportsbooks in both an average and volatility-based framework. In addition, it was found that there was no significant relationship between the two proposed risk statistics
The Powerful Union of Emily Dickinson and Aaron Copland: Creation of Musical Silence through Transcendent Negation
Full text linkThis capstone paper delves into the remarkable success of Aaron Copland\u27s art song settings of Emily Dickinson\u27s poetry. Through detailed poetic and musical analysis, the paper examines the synergy between Dickinson\u27s poetic genius and Copland\u27s compositional mastery. It reveals how Copland\u27s musical interpretations successfully capture and amplify the essence of Dickinson\u27s poetic style and vision
Weihnachten in Industrialized America: Christmas and the Making of German-American identity in Philadelphia, 1880-1920
Full text linkChristmas in the United States has been heavily influenced by immigrant communities. German-immigrants specifically have had a major impact on Christmas in America, as they brought with them an extensive history with Christmas and its motifs, emotions, and traditions. Christmastime in America at the turn of the 20th century, reveals a larger story of German immigration, assimilation, and also resistance to the loss of cultural markers. The first section of the thesis examines the history of Christmas in “Germany,” followed by a section focused on the emotional ties German Americans and Germans have with Christmas. The thesis next demonstrates how the central American figure of Santa Claus became embedded in German-American Christmas, and the significance of his adoption into the cultural practices. What follows these establishing sections are two investigations into the practices of businessmen themselves, G.A. Schwarz and John Wanamaker. This exploration highlights how businessmen who were a part of the German community market this nostalgic Christmas and how those outside the community understand the needs and desires of their new German customers. Finally, the thesis investigates music and alcohol consumption two practices embraced by German households during Christmastime, and how they were both transformed and reinforced through American commercialization. Ultimately, by focusing on German Americans in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, the thesis asks us to reconsider how the celebration of Christmas reflected the way in which identity itself was built during a time in which material culture allowed heritage to be commodified, bought, and sold
Profit shares and cost-push inflation: examining the distributional nature of U.S. inflation and the effectiveness of monetary policy
Full text linkThe sharp increase in post-pandemic inflation coincided with a profit explosion characterized by a growing share of profit in output. This paper argues that the record profit share in the nonfinancial corporate sector entails a redistribution of income against real wages due to the current institutional and structural conditions of the U.S. economy. Using profit share as a proxy for markups, the results of this paper highlight the macroeconomic implications of excessive profitability in the face of a global exogenous shock. Chiefly, rising profit share correlates with accelerating CPI inflation from 2021-22. Moreover, this surge in profit share occurred when capacity utilization was much below pre-pandemic levels to be cyclical in nature. The paper shows that post-pandemic inflation is likely a transitory phenomenon due to the weakened position of labor in wage setting but could persevere in the face of future shocks. The results conclude that policy should take preventative measures to control inflation in a cost-push and profit-led scenario. I show that monetary policy may be exacerbating inflationary pressures as the burden of high interest rates are passed on in the form of diminished purchasing power. Thus, effective inflation targeting must acknowledge the role of institutional conditions that make predatory price-setting behavior conducive in times of overlapping emergencies. Even inducing a moderate recession and unemployment, which is the goal of contractionary monetary policy, can disenfranchise U.S. workers and harm social welfare. Examining the historical behavior of U.S. profit share using the post-Keynesian markup inflation theory, this paper shows that inflation is a distributional problem arising from the conflicting interests of profits and wages in output
Good Girls Don\u27t
Full text linkSet in the year 1980, Good Girls Don\u27t is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy she\u27s long admired, Cathy is faced with an unexpected interruption that will shake her to her core, changing everything she thought she knew about herself, ideas of right and wrong, and her friendship with Heathe
Impact of the US-China Trade War to Chinese-Listed Companies\u27 Stock Returns
Full text linkSince 2018, trade relations between the United States and China have become increasingly tense, with the United States attempting to restrict the development of Chinese companies through measures such as imposing tariffs and establishing entity lists. Chinese companies included in the entity list will lose opportunities to export products to the United States or import new technologies from the United States. This study employs the DID method, using Chinese A-share market-listed companies included in the entity list as samples, to examine the impact of Sino-US trade frictions on the stock returns of Chinese enterprises. The research findings indicate that this event has not had a significant effect on annual stock returns but has significantly negatively affected the annual high and low stock prices
Synthesis of an anti-lysozyme antibody tagged with gold or silver nanoparticle for faster western blot
Full text linkWestern blot is an important protein analysis assay enabling protein detection by visualizing the antibody specific antigen-antibody interaction. As a commonly used assay, western blot is taught in upper-level biochemistry and molecular biology students. However, due to its exhaustive process and high cost of antibodies, a modification to western blot is proposed using gold or silver nanoparticles as a tag to the primary antibody for lysozyme. In this experiment, invisible anti-lysozyme antibodies were conjugated to colloidal gold and silver nanoparticles via photochemical immobilization technique, effectively facilitating a physically observable band on the western blot. To eliminate false positives by interactions between immobilized proteins and the nanoparticles, exposed surfaces of metal were covered with different passivating molecules, of those denatured protein show the most promising results. Gold nanoparticles were modeled for silver nanoparticle tags due to its superior stability in buffers compared to its silver counterpart. However, silver nanoparticles are more convenient due to their ease of synthesis and cost advantages. Both gold and silver labeled antibody enables cost and time optimization to western blot as it does not require a secondary antibody nor developer like horse radish peroxidase