THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE COLLEGE BOARD AP EXAM REGISTRATION PROCESS AND AFRICAN- AMERICAN STUDENTS’ MATHEMATICS AP EXAM PARTICIPATION RATES

College Board implemented a new Advanced Placement Registration Process (APRP) for the 2019-2020 school year. In this study, I argued that the change in the APRP would affect African American student\u27s motivation to participate in mathematics AP exams more disproportionately than other racial groups due to earlier registration and mandatory fees if students change their minds. This quantitative study was grounded in Self-Determination Theory to examine if the APRP affects African American students\u27 feeling of autonomy, competency in their mathematics AP course, and overall intrinsic motivation to register for a mathematics AP exam. The data collected from the survey were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA test, which identified that students who registered for an AP mathematics exam had a stronger sense of vii competence versus students that did not register for the exam. The findings from this study suggest that while the College Board may be continuing to try to increase AP access to African American students, there needs to be a review of their new AP Registration Process and how it could disincentivize African American students to register for an AP mathematics exam

Applications in Macroeconometrics

The title of this work, Applications in Macroeconometrics, reflects the unifying theme of my essays: new, and original research in applied macroeconomics, and applied econometrics. This dissertation consists of three chapters specifically looking at producer price inflation pass-through, technical progress, and moral hazard in United States critical banking markets. My first chapter seeks to quantify the pass-through (PT) and causal direction of producer to consumer prices. We further disaggregate PPI down to commodity-specific indices to quantify disaggregated PPI PT coefficients. By estimating an augmented Phillips Curve, we find short-run PT of aggregate PPI to be around 7 percent. Using a VARX framework, we conduct Toda-Yamamoto tests that show evidence of bidirectional causality between CPI and PPI inflation. When disaggregating down to commodity-specific indices, we find several PPI series that exhibit unidirectional causality and express stronger pass-through coefficients than aggregate PPI. My second chapter (coauthored with Scott Schuh and Brad Humphreys) expands a niche literature that argues how technical progress and productivity growth--which are ordinarily arduous to measure--can be expressed in athletic outcomes. In particular, we formalize the link between race outcomes, and total factor productivity (TFP) using deterministic and stochastic trend econometric models. A bivariate error-correction model reveals evidence that race outcomes and TFP share a common trend, and that race outcomes adjust to TFP but not vice versa. These results suggest aggregate technological progress partially diffuses to firms and industries, and motivates further investigation of the underlying structural relationships. My third chapter contributes new evidence to the literatures on banking performance, and too-big-to-fail (TBTF) in US banking. We estimate a restricted translog semiparametric smooth coefficient seemingly unrelated regressions model (SPSC SUR), wherein model elasticities are functions of nonperforming assets, a proxy for moral hazard, to derive nonperformance-adjusted returns-to-scale estimates for critical market banks from 2001 through 2021. Over our full sample, the median critical market bank tends to operate under increasing returns-to-scale while half of all critical market banks exhibit slight decreasing returns-to-scale. Results taken over the past two decades suggest that most TBTF banks have exhausted their economies of scale concurrent with the shrinking competitive landscape

Do Elections Encourage Public Actors To Be More Responsive?

In the U.S. many public services are provided by individuals who are selected in local elections. We ask whether elections encourage public actors to be responsive to citizens. We design a novel field experiment where we send an information request to a random sample of prosecutor offices. Whether someone replies to the request is our measurement of responsiveness. We show that offices whose head is up for re-election are more likely to respond. We also show that offices in states that appoint their local prosecutors are substantially less likely to respond than a matched set of offices with elected leadership

Do Jet Fuel Price Movements Help Forecast Airline Fares and the Demand for Air Travel?

Citation: Bebonchu, A., Bachmeier, L., & Williams C. (2018) Do Jet Fuel Price Movements Help Forecast Airline Fares and the Demand for Air Travel? Unpublished manuscript.The paper studies the predictive content of jet fuel prices for the U.S. aviation industry through in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting exercises. Our results suggest the possibility of limited improvements in the predictions of airline fares, and little evidence of predictability from jet fuel prices to measures of air travel demand

EVALUATING STRENGTH QUALITIES OF ATHLETES USING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN JUMP PROTOCOLS

Understanding the relationships between jump assessments may provide information of an athlete’s strength qualities. Elastic Utilisation Ratio (EUR) is calculated between countermovement jump (CMJ) and squat jump (SQJ) height, and is suggested to describe the stretch-shortening cycle ability of an athlete. Yet, knowledge of what constitutes a typical EUR range for an athlete remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to assess jump performance and the EUR of athletes from two sports (soccer and distance runners) using a portable forceplate. SQJ and CMJ heights were highly correlated (r>.90). Linear regression and standard error of estimate statistics were then used to estimate CMJ height and derive an expected EUR range. It was concluded, those athletes outside this predicted EUR range would benefit from specific training

LATERALITY AND ITS EFFECT ON LOWER EXTREMITY MUSCULOSKELETAL STIFFNESS IN MALE SOCCER PLAYERS AND TRACK RUNNERS

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of laterality on lower extremity stiffness in healthy soccer players and track runners. Eight soccer players aged 15 to 17 years, and eight track runners, aged from 18 to 25 years performed a battery of tests (Single and double legged continuous straight and bent-legged jumping, and running) to determine lower extremity musculoskeletal stiffness. All participants were injury free at the time of testing. Statistical tests of the various all kinetic measures revealed that the track runners were asymmetrical in their musculoskeletal performance qualities, whereas, the soccer players displayed symmetry. Future research should examine lower extremity symmetry in an older group of soccer players, and the development of a training program to alter lower extremity stiffness into a typical range

Interreligious encounter in a West African city: a study of multiple religious belonging and identity among the Yorùbá of Ogbómòsó, Nigeria

The details of encounters between religious groups in multireligious African contexts and the intricacies of living, belonging, and identifying within such milieux have hardly been explored. In Yorùbáland, the cultural region of the Yorùbá people—and the geographic context of this thesis—the fine grain and vast array of possibilities of interreligious encounter between Christians, Muslims, and adherents of African Indigenous Religions remains largely undocumented in terms of detailed, quality accounts. While most regions of West Africa and even Nigeria exist with a dominant religious tradition, Yorùbáland is a microcosm of the wider region’s multireligious composition, with Christianity, Islam, and African Indigenous Religions all playing prominent roles. The Yorùbá ‘spirit of accommodation’, a phrase often used to describe how Yorùbá culture not only tolerates, but also embeds and synthesises the religious ‘Other’, has created a unique multireligious environ and is undoubtedly one of the optimum contexts in the world to study interreligious encounter within a single ethnolinguistic area. Comprised of fieldwork and research conducted from 2009-2014, this thesis works toward addressing the aforementioned gap in scholarship with two ethnographic case studies of people who simultaneously belong and/or identify with multiple religious groups and traditions in the predominantly Yorùbá city of Ogbómòsó, Nigeria. The first case study examines a new religious group known as the Ogbómòsó Society of Chrislam (OSC). Interreligious encounter in this instance features a group that intentionally combines elements from Christian, Muslim, and indigenous Yorùbá religious traditions, creating dynamic examples of multiple religious belongings and identities. The second case study examines multiple religious belonging and identity at the annual Ogbómòsó Egúngún festival. Interreligious encounter in this instance features 12 individual narrative accounts focusing on each individual’s religious belonging and identity throughout key points in their life. Beyond its important ethnographical contributions, the thesis offers methodological and theoretical insight into approaching religious belonging and identity as complex and fluid processes, rather than static and singular events. It argues that approaches that only allow for the possibility of classifying people in single, discrete categories masks the varied, dynamic, and complex belongings and identities of people in the lived world, many of who live across and within multiple religious groups and traditions

Novel (homo-)Nazarov approaches to complex polycycles and application to bioactive targets

Complex carbocycles and heterocycles make up a large majority of natural product scaffolds and active pharmaceutical ingredient cores. As a result of this, developing methods to obtain such scaffolds in new, greener, and more modular ways remains an invaluable objective within the synthetic organic community. In this thesis, a number of exciting new methodologies have been developed to access some of these scaffolds, and significant progress is shown toward the application of these methodologies to access pharmaceutically-relevant cores: (1) a chemodivergent and catalytic interrupted, formal homo-Nazarov cyclization to access densely functionalized carbocycles, (2) the application of homo-Nazarov methodology toward the anticancer natural product, Propolisbenzofuran B, and (3) the application of Nazarov-like, Friedel- Crafts methodology toward the antimalarial natural product, Flinderole A. These methodological transformations are tolerant of a variety of functionalities, thus giving broad substrate scope. These syntheses seek to have modular key transformations that will allow formation of a wide variety of non-natural analogs, thus providing rapid access to a compound library useful in the study of structure-activity relationships.Ph.D