Essays on Employment Growth, Wage Discrimination, and Marijuana Legalization

The opening chapter covers the impact of the Olympic Games on employment growth. The Olympics Games stand as the largest sporting event in the world. The Games include approximately 200 countries during the Summer Olympic Games and 90 countries competing in the Winter Games, each occurring once every four years. Potential host cities fiercely compete to host the games under the guise of economic prosperity. Event promoters claim substantial economic benefits, such as employment growth, to be had from hosting these costly games. This paper examines the impacts of the Olympic Games on employment growth rates using a synthetic control approach. Results show transitory increases in employment growth rates following a county being awarded the Olympic Games in Fulton County, GA and Salt Lake County, UT. A decrease in employment growth rate appears in Los Angeles County, CA due to being awarded the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. Results suggest that potential hosts should proceed with caution when considering hosting the Olympic Games. Chapter two investigates the prominence of wage discrimination in the National Basketball Association (NBA) using free agent signings from 2011-2017. Free agent signings allow us to better capture the determinants of players\u27 wages, a limitation of the previous NBA wage discrimination literature. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and weighted linear regression models, we find that black athletes are paid significantly less than their counterparts. In addition, weighted quantile regressions show evidence of the presence of consumer discrimination in the league. This is observed through the result that black players with high audience visibility experience a larger racial wage gap; moreover, this gap is positively related to the share of white population of the MSA where the player is employed. In the final chapter, I explore the impact of legalization of marijuana on risky consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Utilizing BRFSS data and a differences-in-differences approach with entropy balancing, results indicate that individuals in states that introduce legal recreational marijuana experience a decrease in risky behaviors. Legal states experience a decrease in the overall use of alcohol, drinking and driving, and smokeless tobacco use. Legalization can weed out risky behaviors involving alcohol and tobacco, indicating that marijuana represents a substitute for alcohol and smokeless tobacco. No significant changes in cigarette smoking occurs following legalization

The joint effect of health shocks and eligibility for social security on labor supply

This paper investigates whether or not suffering a health shock, and becoming eligible for social security, have a joint effect on labor supply. Despite millions of people experiencing both of these events each year, no paper has focused exclusively on the joint effect that these events may have on work outcomes. This is surprising given that experiencing a health shock may impact on how a worker responds to becoming eligible for social security. With data from the Health and Retirement Study, I model weekly hours of work as a function of health shocks, social security eligibility, and their interaction. I find that this interaction leads to a 3–4 h reduction in weekly hours of work for men, but has no effect for women. The results are robust to using different work outcomes, age groups, health shock definitions, subgroups, as well as falsification and placebo tests. The results appear to be driven by men who would have had to return to work with impaired health. Policies that promote a more flexible work situation for older men may alleviate these problems in the future

The legend of Diarmuid and Grania: its history and treatment by modern writers.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe latter half of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings in Ireland of the Celtic revival, a literary movement which sent modern Irish writers who were using the medium of English back to the ancient Gaelic literature of their country for inspiration. Historians, translators, and linguistic scholars had uncovered, in their study of this Gaelic literature, a rich mine of myth and legend which the Anglo-Irish were quick to use in literary works of their own. The old Irish literature can boast of two famous cycles. The first, called the Ulster cycle, centers around the heroes of the Red Branch who lived in north-eastern Ireland and includes the many tales of the mighty Cuchulain. The second cycle, the Fenian or Ossianic, celebrates the deeds of the popular Irish hero, Finn MacCool, and his Fenian warriors. In both cycles there are stories which modern Irish writers have found appealing enough to re-tell in English, the language which Ireland now uses. Of the Fenian tales, one of the best-known and one that is still recited as folk-lore by Gaelic-speaking peasants is the legend of Diarmuid and Grania. It differs from most of the stories in this cycle in its portrayal of Finn , not as the generous, wise , powerful leader of his men, but as a jealous , petty tyrant. The legend tells the story of Grania , the daughter of Cormac MacArt, the High King of Ireland , and Diarmuid, the handsomest man in the Fianna and nephew of Finn MacCool himself. Grania, who is betrothed to Finn, falls in love with the chivalrous Diarmuid and forces him to elope with her. They flee from the court at Tara and are pursued throughoutIreland by the jealous Finn. Eventually Finn succeeds in sending Diarmuid to his death and wins back to himself the affections of the fickle Grania.[TRUNCATED] The manner in which an author re-tells an old story and gives it creative treatment of his own is always of interest to t he student of literature. The several authors who were attracted to the legend of Diarmvuid and Grania have all handled the old story differently and with varying degrees of success.(Brief mention has been made in this study of the allusive and symbolical references to the legend in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.) Although the central line of action is the same, the characterizations, the selection of episodes from the original versions, and the actual method of unfolding the narrative all differ in these modern re-tellings. That so many writers found the old story appealing enough to warrant their giving it literary treatment of their own points to the human appeal and enduring interest of this old Celtic love story

The Public Choice of Public Stadium Financing: Evidence from San Diego Referenda

Abstract: Local politicians and team owners frequently argue that the public financing of stadiums is important for local economic development. The sports economics literature, however, has largely found that new professional sport facilities do not generate any new net economic activity. We provide context to this literature by exploring the public choice in the public financing of stadiums. In 2016, San Diego had two ballot measures related to the San Diego Chargers. Measure C would allow officials to raise hotel taxes to pay for a new downtown stadium for the Chargers. Measure D would also raise hotel taxes, but explicitly prevented any money being spent on the Chargers. Both measures failed to receive 50% of the votes cast. We find that zip codes with a higher voter turnout were more likely to vote against both measures, highlighting the importance of the timing of referenda in limiting the ability of clearly defined groups, such as Chargers fans, to have a large influence on the voting outcome. Meanwhile, areas with more Trump voters were more likely to support higher taxes for the purpose of building the Chargers a new stadium

The Effect of Superstar Players on Game Attendance: Evidence from the NBA

Economic models predict that “superstar” players generate externalities that increase attendance and other revenue sources beyond their individual contributions to team success. We investigate the effect of superstar players on individual game attendance at National Basketball Association games from 1981/82 through 2013/14. Regression models control for censoring due to sellouts, quality of teams, unobservable team/season heterogeneity, and expected game out-comes. The results show higher home and away attendance associated with superstar players. Michael Jordan generated the largest superstar attendance externality, generating an additional 5,021/5,631 fans at home/away games

Supply of Primary Care Providers and Appointment Availability for Philadelphia\u27s Medicaid Population

This brief analyzes the supply of primary care providers serving the Medicaid population in Philadelphia, and the geographic variability of this measure across the city. It also examines important measures of access – appointment availability and wait time for an initial appointment – that highlight challenges faced by Medicaid patients

An End-to-End Approach for Training Neural Network Binary Classifiers on Metrics Based on the Confusion Matrix

While neural network binary classifiers are often evaluated on metrics such as Accuracy and $F_1$-Score, they are commonly trained with a cross-entropy objective. How can this training-testing gap be addressed? While specific techniques have been adopted to optimize certain confusion matrix based metrics, it is challenging or impossible in some cases to generalize the techniques to other metrics. Adversarial learning approaches have also been proposed to optimize networks via confusion matrix based metrics, but they tend to be much slower than common training methods. In this work, we propose to approximate the Heaviside step function, typically used to compute confusion matrix based metrics, to render these metrics amenable to gradient descent. Our extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our end-to-end approach for binary classification in several domains

Physical insights, characteristics and diagnosis of structural freeplay nonlinearity in transonic aeroelastic systems: a system identification based approach

The Next Generation of aircraft sustainment is based on an emerging paradigm known as Prognostics and Health Management. PHM encompasses numerous innovative concepts which shape the future of air asset sustainment according to pre-emptive condition-based maintenance, intelligence-based individual aircraft tracking, and damage/fault prognosis. Smart Diagnostics is an integral component of the SPHM paradigm, and refers to the detection, localisation and tracking of nonlinear structural anomalies that occur in various forms across the airframe structure or within mechanical interfaces. Control surface damage/ failure scenarios, such as, nonlinear hinge stiffness, backlash, and structural freeplay, are a class of structural anomaly which plague modern aircraft and introduce a range of dangerous nonlinear dynamic behaviours, such as, chaotic response and limit cycle oscillation. As a result, the freeplay structural anomaly can reduce fatigue life and is problematic for the stakeholder on many levels, including the management of structural health, maintenance practices, asset availability, mission capability, and sustainment provisions. The traditional approach to handling freeplay-type nonlinear events is based on avoidance and pre-emptive repetitive maintenance practices which, despite being over-conservative, inefficient and expensive, have remained unchanged for more than half a century. As the aerospace sector begins to adopt modern aircraft design and sustainment practices, including the realisation of SPHM-based technologies, there is an urgent requirement for contemporary solutions towards the diagnosis and tracking of structural freeplay anomalies. The research presented in this thesis is pursued with the global objective of contributing towards contemporary structural health monitoring technology through a nonlinear system identification framework for rapid control surface freeplay diagnostics. The proposed framework is driven by the fundamental assumption that all information pertaining to the freeplay event is contained within the time-histories extracted from an aircraft¿s sensory network. It is shown that through careful adaptation of well-established nonlinear system identification methods, namely the Higher-Order Spectra (HOS) and Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT), rapid detection, localisation and magnitude tracking of the freeplay event is realisable, through a truly data-driven framework, with no inherent dependency of knowledge of the airframe structure, the flight parameters, the aerodynamic condition, or uncertainties. A novel and systematic approach is used to characterise the freeplay event, where nonlinear aeroelastic predictions (numerical aeroelastic models of increasing complexity) are considered to study the isolated physical freeplay mechanism in a nonlinear system identification setting, to understand how its physical action on an aeroelastic system can be exploited for diagnostics purposes. The findings are adapted to formulate temporal and spectral characteristic signatures, then implemented as a basis for the data-driven diagnostics strategy. A flight test case study is used to show that the signature-based diagnostics framework which is formulated using numerical cases with well-defined parameters, remains valid when diagnosing freeplay in a real-world aircraft system. The freeplay is detected and isolated, then a single tuned algorithm is shown to efficiently track the freeplay magnitude over the course of three years with several maintenance/ repair cycles, using a sensor with significant spatial discrepancy to the freeplay source. It is shown that rapid actionable diagnostics information can be extracted with a high level of robustness, demonstrated and verified by making consistent predictions despite: i) a large deviation in Mach number and angle-of-attack (with high angle manoeuvres), ii) highly nonlinear aerodynamic conditions, iii) no knowledge of uncertainty bounds, iv) mixture between stationary nonstationary response, and iv) little information available pertaining to the aircraft structural properties or geometry (a single geometric vector is used). In developing the diagnostics framework, numerous freeplay induced nonlinear phenomena are revisited, providing a new understanding of the structural freeplay physical mechanism. Several freeplay-induced nonlinear phenomena are defined, quantified and related according to a consolidated underlying nonlinear mechanism, founded upon empirically derived correlations. In showing that data-driven signature-based diagnostics is feasible for freeplay, this research makes a significant contribution towards the fields of nonlinear system identification, applied nonlinear dynamics and aircraft structural health monitoring. This provides a clear pathway to extend this signature-based system identification diagnostics strategy to capture other discrete nonlinear mechanisms in aircraft systems, or any relevant mechanical systems across the engineering disciplines. Requirements and limiting aspects of the data-driven approach are thoroughly discussed, predominantly related to sensory network requirements, and recommendations on how to address the limitations and progress with this research are clearly outlined

Uma proposta museológica integrada para o Castelo de Castro Marim

Dissertação de Mestrado Integrado em Arquitetura com a especialização em Arquitetura apresentada na Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre.Este projeto de final de mestrado consiste numa proposta de reabilitação no Castelo de Castro Marim, que se reflete na integração de um novo museu arqueológico incorporado nas Ruínas. Tratando-se de um património histórico é necessário ter a consciência de que é o testemunho físico de um passado, o seu solo é um campo arqueológico, que representa a evolução desse território ao longo dos anos. Procura-se preservar na íntegra as muralhas, acrescentando pequenas estruturas que ajudam a mostrar a potencialidade histórica e arquitetónica do Castelo. Existe uma necessidade de compreender as pré-existências, de modo a manter a memória do lugar. O novo, apesar de se tratar de uma arquitetura mais atual, funde-se no território de forma a não contrastar na paisagem. Posto isto, é dada importância ao tema da ruína, em entender o seu conceito e descodificar de que maneira o arquiteto pode utilizar a ruína como ponto de partida para um projeto mais atual, e qual é a sua relevância. Com base na investigação sobre a Ruína e com a procura de uma proposta arquitetónica adequada ao local constata-se que as Ruínas são uma ferramenta para o arquiteto aprender e pensar em arquitetura – um pensamento através do desenho pela observação das Ruínas. É o desenho que ensina a observar, a criar imagens do passado e transpô-las para o presente. Através do desenho movimentamo-nos dentro das ruínas, dentro da arquitetura, de um modo mais criativo.ABSTRACT: This final project consists in a proposal for rehabilitation at the Castro Marim Castle which is reflected in the integration of a new archaeological museum incorporated in the Ruins. As it is a historical heritage, it is necessary to be aware that it is the physical testimony of a past, its soil is an archaeological field, which represents the evolution of this territory over the years. The aim is to preserve the walls in their entirety, adding small structures to help showing the historical and architectural potential of the Castle. There is a need to understand the existing environment, in order to maintain the memory of the place and so that the new one merges with the existing one but at the same time assumes itself as a new layer and does not interfere in a contrasting way in the landscape. A big importance is given to the theme of ruin, in understanding its concept and decoding how the architect can use Ruin as a starting point for a more current project and what is its relevance. With this investigation of the Ruins and the search for an architectural proposal suitable to the place, it appears that the Ruins are a tool for the architect to learn and think about architecture - a thought through drawing by observing the Ruins. It is the drawing that teaches you to observe, to create images of the past and to transpose them into the present. Through drawing we move within the ruins, within the architecture, in a more creative way.N/

Re.Obre : reconversió d'industria a habitatge

Reobre neix de la idea de crear un espai d’habitatges accessibles a aquella part més oblidada de la població a l’hora d’oferir un lloc on amarrar les arrels per créixer almón laboral, els jovesReobre neix de la idea de crear un espai d’habitatges accessibles a aquella part més oblidada de la població a l’hora d’oferir un lloc on amarrar les arrels per créixer al món laboral, els joves. La intenció que proporciona aquest projecte és dur a terme un espai d’habitatges amb condicions òptimes, perquè l’habitant no deixi de tenir qualitatde vida, alhora que un espai on poder emancipar-se i créixer al món laboral. L’espai escollit per recollir la proposta és l’antiga fàbrica de can Batlló, situat a la gran via de la ciutat de Barcelona.Reobre nace de la idea de crear un espacio de viviendas accesibles a aquella parte más olvidada de la población a la hora de ofrecer un lugar donde amarrar las raíces para crecer en el mundo laboral, los jóvenes. La intención que este proyecto proporciona es llevar a cabo un espacio de viviendas con condiciones óptimas, para que el habitante no deje de tener calidad de vida, a la vez que un espacio donde poder emanciparse y crecer en el mundo laboral. El espacio escogido para recoger la propuesta es la antigua fábrica de Can Batlló, situado en la gran vía de la ciudad de Barcelona.Reobre was born from the idea of creating a housing space accessible to the most forgotten part of the population when it comes to offering a place to tie the roots to grow in the world of work, young people. The intention of this project is to carry out a housing space with optimal conditions, so that the inhabitantdoes not stop having a quality of life, at the same time as a space where he can emancipate himself and grow in the world of work. The space chosen to collect the proposal is the old Can Batlló factory, located on Gran via in the city of Barcelona