Fat People Exist

A couple weeks ago, I closed the stall door behind me in a Patrick Hall bathroom and was greeted by this sign. I quickly scanned the text, smiled at the picture, and had one of those warm, fuzzy, faith-in-humanity-has-been-restored kinds of moments

Fearless Friday: Julie Davin

In this week’s edition of Fearless Friday, SURGE is honoring all of the amazing work that Julie Davin ’17 does for our community. Julie, originally from Newtown, Connecticut, is currently a senior at Gettysburg College majoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and minoring in English and Philosophy. Over the course of her college career, Julie has been involved with the Gettysburg Anti-Capitalist Collective (GACC), Students Against Sexual Assault (SASA), Outerspace (formerly Friend or Foe), SURGE, Gettysburg Cares, and the annual Vagina Monologues. This long list of activities does not faze Julie; she cares deeply about each and every cause and is glad to have time to dedicate to them. [excerpt

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**TRIGGER WARNING** You are walking to class when you feel someone grab your butt with both hands. You scream, swing around, and watch your assailant sprint away. You feel humiliated, disgusted, violated. You look over your shoulder with every step on the way home and cry yourself to sleep. [excerpt

Subsides for FDI : Implications from a Model with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of subsidies to attract multinational corporations, in a setting where firms are heterogeneous in their productivity levels. I show that the use of a small subsidy raises welfare in the FDI host country, with the consumption gains from attracting more multinationals exceeding the direct costs of funding the subsidy program through a tax on labor income. This welfare gain stems from a selection effect, whereby the subsidy induces only the most productive exporters to switch to servicing the host's market via FDI. I further show that the welfare gain from a subsidy to variable costs is larger than from a subsidy to the fixed cost of conducting FDI, since a variable cost subsidy also raises the ineciently low output levels stemming from each firm's mark-up pricing power.FDI subsidies, Heterogeneous Firms, fixed versus variable cost subsidies, import subsidies

Institutions, Wages and Inequality : The Case of Europe and its Periphery (1500-1899)

This paper explores the long-run relationship between institutions and wage outcomes in Europe and its periphery. I find that cities that exercised stronger institutional protection of private property experienced : (i) higher levels of both skilled and unskilled real wages, as well as (ii) lower levels of inequality as measured by the skilled-unskilled wage ratio. While the first result corroborates existing work on the positive growth effects of better institutions, the second finding is more novel to the literature. Some explanations are proposed for how stronger institutions can cause an increase in the relative supply of skilled workers, thus lowering wage inequality.institutions, Wage inequality, European cities

Subsidies for FDI: Implications from a Model with Heterogenous Firms

This paper develops a two-country version of the Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2004) model with heterogenous firms to analyze the welfare effects of subsidy schemes to attract multinationals. Considering policies financed by a tax on labor income, I show formally that the use of a small cost subsidy by the host country to multinational firms raises welfare in that country. This welfare improvement stems from a selection effect: The subsidy attracts the most productive home country exporters to switch to servicing the foreign market via FDI, allowing foreign consumers to access these firms' products at a lower price by saving on cross-border transport costs. This consumption gain to the foreign country outweighs the direct costs of funding the subsidy precisely because it is the most productive home country exporters that respond to the FDI subsidy. Some benchmark calibrations show that the magnitude of the welfare gains from a subsidy to variable costs is substantially larger than from a subsidy to the fixed cost of conducting FDI. Intuitively, a variable cost subsidy also helps to raise the inefficiently low output levels of each firm stemming from their mark-up pricing powerFDI subsidies, heterogenous firms

Unpacking Sources of Comparative Advantage: A Quantitative Approach

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the importance of different sources of comparative advantage for country welfare. To explain patterns of specialization, I present a multi-country trade model that extends Eaton and Kortum (2002) to predict industry trade ows. In this framework, comparative advantage is determined by the interaction of country and industry characteristics, with countries specializing in industries whose specific production needs they are best able to meet with their factor endowments and institutional strengths. I estimate the model parameters on a large dataset of bilateral trade flows, presenting results from both a baseline OLS approach, as well as a simulated method of moments (SMM) procedure to account for the prevalence of zero trade fl ows in the data. I apply the model to explore various quantitative questions, in particular how much distance, Ricardian productivity, factor endowments, and institutional conditions each matter for country welfare in the global trade equilibrium. I also illustrate the shift in industry composition and the accompanying welfare gains in policy experiments where a country raises its factor endowments or improves the quality of its institutions.Comparative advantage, bilateral trade ows, gravity, Ricardian model, factor endowments, institutional determinants of trade, simulated method of moments

We control it on our end, and now it\u27s up to you -- Exploitation, Empowerment, and Ethical Portrayals of the Pornography Industry

Documentaries about pornography are beginning to constitute an entirely new subgenre of film. Big Hollywood names like James Franco and Rashida Jones are jumping on the bandwagon, using their influence and resources to invest in a type of audiovisual knowledge production far less mainstream than that in which they usually participate. The films that have resulted from this new movement are undoubtedly persuasive, no matter which side of the debate over pornography these directors have respectively chosen to represent. Moreover, regardless of the side(s) that audience members may have taken in the so-called “feminist porn debates,” one cannot ignore the rhetorical strength of the arguments presented in a wide variety of documentaries about pornography. However, the ways in which these filmmakers use audiovisual rhetoric to convey their respective arguments are far from simple. My research explores and analyzes the various types of rhetoric that filmmakers use when creating documentaries about pornography. I also investigate precisely how these types of rhetoric are used, and why viewers find them so persuasive. My visual analysis focuses primarily on Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus’s Hot Girls Wanted (2015), Bryce Wagoner’s After Porn Ends (2012), and Christina A. Voros’s Kink (2013) – the first offers a particularly negative view of pornography, the second a nuanced view, and the third a particularly positive view

Subsidies for FDI: Implications from a Model with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper analyzes the welfare e®ects of subsidies to attract multinational corporations, in a setting where ¯rms are heterogeneous in their productivity levels. I show that the use of a small subsidy raises welfare in the FDI host country, with the consumption gains from attracting more multinationals exceeding the direct costs of funding the subsidy program through a tax on labor income. This welfare gain stems from a selection e®ect, whereby the subsidy induces only the most productive exporters to switch to servicing the host's market via FDI. I further show that the welfare gain from a subsidy to variable costs is larger than from a subsidy to the ¯xed cost of conducting FDI, since a variable cost subsidy also raises the ine±ciently low output levels stemming from each ¯rm's mark-up pricing power.FDI subsidies; heterogeneous firms; fixed versus variable cost subsidies; import subsidies.

Unpacking Sources of Comparative Advantage : A Quantitative Approach

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the importance of different sources of comparative advantage for country welfare. To explain patterns of specialization, I present a multi-country trade model that extends Eaton and Kortum (2002) to predict industry trade ows. In this framework, comparative advantage is determined by the interaction of country and industry characteristics, with countries specializing in industries whose specific production needs they are best able to meet with their factor endowments and institutional strengths. I estimate the model parameters on a large dataset of bilateral trade ows, presenting results from both a baseline OLS approach, as well as a simulated method of moments (SMM) procedure to account for the prevalence of zero trade ows in the data. I apply the model to explore various quantitative questions, in particular how much distance, Ricardian productivity, factor endowments, and institutional conditions each matter for country welfare in the global trade equilibrium. I also illustrate the shift in industry composition and the accompanying welfare gains in policy experiments where a country raises its factor endowments or improves the quality of its institutions.Comparative Advantage, bilateral trade flows, Gravity, Ricardian model, Factor Endowments, institutional determinants of trade, simulated method of moments