Factors Affecting Retention of Transfer Students at Linfield College

Building on the work of Tyler (2011), this paper analyzes the factors that affect the decision by transfer students at Linfield College to return for a second year. Data was obtained for transfer students from the Department of Institutional Research at Linfield College from 2009 to 2013. We estimate the logit probabilities of retention likelihood as a function of academic ability, net price, curricular engagement, extra-curricular engagement, choice of major and demographic characteristics. We find that academic ability, curricular engagement, institutional commitment, and choice of major variables may be significant factors in the retention of transfer students at Linfield College. The estimated effects and the resulting conclusions must be interpreted cautiously due to our small sample size. However, a discussion of the results shows that Linfield may be able to improve retention of transfer students through increased curricular engagement and greater departmental awareness

Essays in the economics of care

2022 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The Build Back Better legislation (H.R. 5376) currently being debated in Congress represents the first major attempt to build a care infrastructure that heavily invests in children and families, recognizing the value of care and care workers. The legislation (1) promotes recruitment, education, training, retention, and career advancements of direct care workers by providing competitive wages, benefits, and other support services to the direct care workforce; (2) establishes an entitlement program to provide qualifying families the opportunity to obtain high-quality child care; (3) allows states, almost entirely federally funded for the first three years, to provide universal preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds; (4) establishes universal paid family leave; (5) provides infrastructure grants to improve child care safety; (6) supplies child care wage grants for small businesses; (7) provides child care allowances as part of trade adjustment programs for workers; (8) makes permanent the expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provided by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021; and (9) establishes payroll tax credit for child care workers and tax credits for caregiver expenses. In their own way, each chapter of this dissertation speaks to policies outlined in this legislation. In Chapter 1, titled The Role of Care Policy in Procyclical Child Mortality, I investigate the impact of the business cycle on child mortality. I conceptualize care as being supplied by three sectors---household, private, and public---and argue that public investment and provision insulates children from cyclical fluctuations in the quantity and quality of care provided. I then hypothesize that, in so far as the care mechanism mediates procyclical child mortality, children who are most likely to be the beneficiaries of generous care policy will be less exposed to the mortality risks of economic boom. Employing a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1960-2015, I show that procyclical mortality is null for children 5 to 9 years of age. This is the age group for which all OECD countries in my sample have universal, publicly provided care---i.e., primary education. Among children 0 to 4 years old, however, economic expansions are associated with increased risk of mortality. I then show that procyclical mortality among the 0- to 4-year-old age group is attenuated, and even disappears, in increasingly generous care policy environments. In Chapter 2, titled The Contemporaneous Mortality Benefits of the Head Start Program, I investigate the impact of Head Start on population-level child mortality. Though widely perceived as a schooling program focused on cognitive development, I argue that the "whole child" services provided by Head Start act as a de facto investment into the health and safety of poor children. The Head Start Expansion and Quality Improvement Act of 1990 led to considerable variation in program funding across localities. Further, program age requirements meant that increases in funding were largely directed toward the enrollment of 3- and 4-year-old children. Employing a sample of 50 large labor market areas over the period 1983 to 2007, I estimate log-log and log-linear fixed-effect mortality regressions and find that, relative to 1- to 2-year-olds, increases in Head Start funding are associated with reductions in 3- and 4-year-old mortality, all else equal. Then, utilizing that fact that children must also be poverty-eligible for Head Start, I show that the potential mortality benefits of Head Start are pronounced in relatively poor and disproportionately Black communities, as expected. In Chapter 3, titled Revisiting the Wages of Virtue and the Relative Pay of Care Work, I extend and update previous research by investigating the relative pay of care work in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Research in feminist and labor economics provide several theoretical rationale as to why workers in care occupations might receive lower wages. I employ three separate measures of care work and show the continued existence of wage penalties among nurturant care occupations, while there appears to be no wage penalty for workers in reproductive care occupations, all else equal. Testing for heterogeneous care penalties across the occupational skill distribution, I find that the wage penalty for nurturant care work increases in relatively high-skill occupations among men. Alternatively, the wage penalty for nurturant care work is null, if not a slight wage premium, in relatively high-skill occupations among women. I explore potential explanations for the inconsistent behavior of these estimated care penalties across gender, such as occupational crowding and selection via occupational segregation, or sorting. The findings of this chapter have important implications for care penalty literature and motivate potential avenues of future research

Competitive Tiling

Competitive tiling consists of two players, a tile set, a region, and a non-negative integer d. Alice and Bob, our two players, alternate placing tiles on the untiled squares of the region. They play until no more tiles can be placed. Alice wins if at most d squares are untiled at the end of the game, and Bob wins if more than d squares are untiled. For given regions and tile sets we are interested in the smallest value of d such that Alice has a winning strategy. We call this the game tiling number. In this project, we focus on finding the game tiling number for the game played with dominoes on 2 x n rectangles, modified 2 x n rectangles, and rectangular annular regions

Tilings of Annular Region

We present our summer research on mathematical tiling. We classified which rectangular annular regions are tileable by the set of T and skew tretrominoes. We present a partial proof of this result, and discuss some of the context for this problem

Estimating wildlife strike costs at US airports: A machine learning approach

Current lower bound estimates of the economic burden of wildlife strikes make use of mean cost assignment to impute missing values in the National Wildlife Strike Database (NWSD). The accuracy of these estimates, however, are undermined by the skewed nature of reported cost data and fail to account for differences in observed strike characteristics—e.g., type of aircraft, size of aircraft, type of damage, size of animal struck, etc. This paper makes use of modern machine learning techniques to provide a more accurate measure of the strike-related costs that accrue to the US civil aviation industry. We estimate that wildlife strikes costed the US civil aviation industry a minimum average of $54.3 million in total losses annually over the 1990–2018 period. If one assumes that wildlife strikes were underreported by as much as a factor of 3 over the same period, our estimates still fall below previous lower bound estimates

The impact of the COVID‑19 pandemic on wildlife–aircraft collisions at US airports

Exploiting unprecedented reductions in aircraft movements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated the relationship between air traffic volume and the frequency of wildlife-aircraft collisions, or wildlife strikes, at the 50 largest airports in the United States. During the COVID- 19 months of 2020 (March–December), both air traffic volume and the absolute number of wildlife strikes were reduced. The net effect of these two movements, however, was an increase in the wildlife strike rate from May 2020–September 2020. This increase was found to be most pronounced at airports with larger relative declines in air traffic volume. We concluded that the observed increase in the wildlife strike rate was, at least in part, generated by risk-enhancing changes in wildlife abundance and behavior within the airport environment. That is, wildlife became more abundant and active at airports in response to declines in air traffic volume

The impact of the COVID‑19 pandemic on wildlife–aircraft collisions at US airports

Exploiting unprecedented reductions in aircraft movements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated the relationship between air traffic volume and the frequency of wildlife-aircraft collisions, or wildlife strikes, at the 50 largest airports in the United States. During the COVID- 19 months of 2020 (March–December), both air traffic volume and the absolute number of wildlife strikes were reduced. The net effect of these two movements, however, was an increase in the wildlife strike rate from May 2020–September 2020. This increase was found to be most pronounced at airports with larger relative declines in air traffic volume. We concluded that the observed increase in the wildlife strike rate was, at least in part, generated by risk-enhancing changes in wildlife abundance and behavior within the airport environment. That is, wildlife became more abundant and active at airports in response to declines in air traffic volume