Maggie Greenberg, Ryan Panek

This summer we worked with Professor Atwood to examine the educational impact of the measles vaccine in Texas. Professor Atwood has previously studied the impact of the measles vaccine on employment and earnings in the U.S. in her 2022 paper. Professor Atwood and Professor Pearlman worked together on examining the impact of the measles vaccine on both schooling and labor market outcomes in Mexico in their paper from May 2024. Through our research this summer we seek to fill a missing link in her research by showing how the measles vaccine affects schooling in the U.S.

Our focus this summer is on Texas because it has a large amount of data available both on disease and education. Additionally, Texas being such a populous state is ideal because we have a wide range of counties, from very urban to very rural, that allows us to exploit variation in incidence rates of disease and population densities. We read through the medical literature on measles and found that it proves to be a unique disease to study because it is universal and causes “immune amnesia”. Universal means practically everyone will contract it at some point in their childhoods before the vaccine introduction. Immune amnesia means that when children contract measles not only do they get sick but their bodies lose the antibodies to other infectious diseases which then take about three to five years to rebuild. Therefore, once children have measles they are more likely to get sicker throughout their childhoods, which we would hypothesize has an impact on educational attainment. 

Our work has included manually entering the data for the disease counts for a myriad of illnesses in every county in Texas from 1951 to 1977, as well as the attendance and related education data for the individual school districts from 1960 to 1971. We used Stata software to clean our data and run descriptive statistics. We also created maps and figures that highlighted case counts over time. Initially, we expected measles cases to experience an immediate drop-off when the vaccine was licensed but our data showed that a drop-off did not occur until a few years after the licensing. From there we worked on piecing together a puzzle of the history of the Texas vaccine rollout to figure out why this is. We sorted through hundreds of newspaper clippings, TV broadcast scripts, video footage, medical journals, and more to learn about who had access to the vaccine and when. 

With all the information we have gathered this summer, we plan on writing an article about the measles vaccine rollout in Texas. Meanwhile, having uncovered Texas’ complicated vaccination timeline, we are working towards a clearer picture of before and after periods so that we can run event studies and continue our statistical analysis. We hope our research can add to a story not just about the importance of vaccines but also about the need for large-scale federal policy to ensure the implementation of immunization efforts and healthcare as a whole. 

During the past eight weeks, I worked with professors Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Michael Aronna on preparing the first volume of the Oviedo Project for publication. This is a long-term and large-scale project, spanning several years of translation work by other students (including other Ford scholars) of the thousands of pages of writings produced by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo about the New World in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies). After many semesters of translating, editing, and revising, the first volume has been accepted for publication by Brill!

In order to finalize this first volume, I helped research and write footnotes for some of the volume’s early books. We first had to come up with a footnoting methodology, deciding which historical figures, places, mythological figures, and other references would be footnoted. We also had to decide a general pattern for the footnotes—how extensive they would be, and which format they would use. Because of the scale of the project and the extensiveness of our footnoting, we created a spreadsheet to keep track of our completed progress. I worked specifically on footnoting books two and four, which I completed. Each book contained numerous chapters. I periodically shared and discussed my work with my professors to ensure our agreement on the final footnotes, adding or removing any information we found necessary or irrelevant. Additionally, we combed through these books for small, final edits, such as the removal of contractions and ensuring the clarity of all translations. 

In total, we finished editing about four of the nineteen books in the first volume. The volume should be ready to send to Brill by the end of February. It has been a pleasure and an honor to add my contributions to this incredible project!

This summer, I worked with Professor Jaime Del Razo to study the efforts and effects of the United States military to recruit individuals directly from high school. Since the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) replaced the draft in 1973, the military has shifted its tactics to maintain its size and staffing requirements through recruitment. Such tactics include building relationships with high schools and accessing student information through policies like the NCLB (No Child Left Behind Act) and the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act). Because the AVF military competes with the labor market to meet its quota, schools and the military cooperate, allowing recruiters to sell the promise of education, health care, stable housing, and a respected career.

We examined the complex dynamic between the military, schools, and its students who have limited options following high school. We spent numerous hours at the West Point Military Academy’s Library seeking a broad range of sources that shed light on high school recruitment, contributing to the existing literature review in Professor Del Razo’s upcoming book. Additionally, we scoured research centers and DoD (Department of Defense) sources for more data on high school recruitment, as well as potential legislative changes in the National Defense Authorization Act that may impact males after turning 18 and potentially all genders. Lastly, we conducted a focus group interviewing veterans who were enlisted directly or shortly after high school. Following the focus group, I executed the first-round coding of the focus group data, searching for themes and patterns across the focus group participants.

This work especially mattered to Professor Del Razo and me because we are both products of the school-to-military pipeline. Through this gratifying research, the stories of many women and men I served with who were recruited from high school have earned a place in academics and a study of militarism in the United States.

Daniel Duque Hernandez Class of 2027 & Karla Evangelista Class of 2026

Daniel Mendiola, professor of History

In the summer of 2024, Daniel Duque Hernandez ’27 and Karla Evangelista ’26 spent 6 weeks in Poughkeepsie as Ford Scholars for professor Daniel Mendiola’s initiative, Somos Vecinos. The oral history project comes from the premise that Latin American immigrants are vital to the Poughkeepsie community, and that making their stories available to others has the power of strengthening bonds by illuminating their experiences, memories, ideas and advice.

Daniel Duque Hernandez and Dr. Mendiola dedicated Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 to the preparation for the project. Their efforts included securing funding from the Consortium on Forced Migration Displacement and Education obtaining Institutional Review Board approval, drafting consent forms, initiating discussions with community members, and envisioning the project’s ultimate impact to Poughkeepsie and the Vassar community.

During this six-week period, we dedicated significant time to biking throughout Poughkeepsie to engage our neighbors in participating in our project. For the business owners who agreed to be part of the project, we scheduled and conducted interviews at the Chicago audio studio. We utilized the Audacity software to edit the recordings into our desired documentary style. The next step involved transcribing the interviews and translating them from Spanish to English, a lengthy process as we often had to rewind to hear the precise words they spoke, and choose the appropriate wording that would best match the sentence in Spanish.

The project concluded with 7 translations and transcriptions along with 5 mini promotional videos. Professor Mendiola made some final edits in order to finally upload all the interviews, along with some promotional videos we recorded and edited to Vassar’s digital library. We hope you have the opportunity to listen to them!

Our neighbors as we call them, told their narratives of resilience, perseverance, bravery, but most importantly, triumph. We know that everyone who listens to the stories shared, will find in their words a wellspring of wisdom.

Thank you to our Vecinos!

Yusuf Bomba, Class of 2026

This summer I worked with Professor Sarah Pearlman and looked at the changing rates and demographics of migration from Mexico to the United States, and how they impacted the labor market. During the first half of the project, I focused mainly on the changing demographics of the people migrating. I began by collecting census data and ACS data from IPUMS and by cleaning data from the Mexican Migration Project. The Mexican Migration Project collected retrospective data from different regions in Mexico about peoples first and last trips to the United States, and began collecting data in 1986. Once I had collected data, I utilized Stata to create line graphs, bar graphs, and scatter plots to outline how the demographics of people migrating have changed since the early 1900s and found that, on average, migrants in recent decades were older and more educated. Through this process I also found just how impactful the Bracero program was in influencing the flow of migration and the impact on the labor force between 1942 and 1964. The Bracero program was a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico that provided temporary agricultural visas to Mexican workers and allowed them to come to the United States and return to Mexico multiple times over the course of two decades.

We also took a trip to Ellis Island to visit the immigration museum. At this museum, I was able to learn more about the general migration patterns in the US and much of my own research was confirmed by information present at the museum.

I then moved over to mapping migration by US state to outline the areas in the US that were most impacted by the flows of migrants. This then evolved into mapping the flows of migrants by state and by industry as I sorted the data into groups of those working in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. I concluded by beginning to look at wage regressions for Mexican born workers in the United States.

Maya Lubetsky ’26

This summer, I worked with Professor Christine Howlett to help run the Hudson Valley Bachfest that is held at Vassar. The first part of this project involved studying community engagement. I was able to become acquainted with the members of Bachfest and understand how choral music had led them to meet and care for people from many different walks of life. I was able to interact with the Bachfest members not only as an administrator but also as a fellow choral singer as I had the pleasure of joining the choir. For the second part of the project, I wrote the program notes for the four pieces that the choir sang. While writing these detailed notes I learned how complicated it can be to research pieces dating back to the 17th century as a lot of information has been lost to history. However, it can be exciting to parse through lots of sources to come up with a clearer understanding of these compositions and their place in history. I created a bibliography to help track all the research and sources I used to create the program notes.

For Bachfest we of course sang some Bach. But we also sang pieces from Dieterich Buxtehude and Heinrich Schutz. By singing pieces written before Bach’s time, choral singers and listeners can better understand his contributions to music (in this case choral music) and how it continually evolves.

Thank you Professor Howlett for the opportunity to work on such an engaging project and further discover my passion for music history.

Nathan Shih ’25, Charlie Wan ’26

Benjamin Ho, Professor of Economics

This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Benjamin Ho and fellow scholar Charlie Wan ’25 on three behavioral economics projects: Big Lies, Trading Favors, and Altruism and Attachment. Our research involved analyzing data to explore the reception to and detection of lies, the factors that influence the reciprocity of favors, and the relationship between altruism and material attachment. These projects provided us with valuable insights into the complex interplay between human behavior and economic principles. The sections below outline a brief summary of each project.

Big Lies (Charlie Wan ’26)

This study aimed to look at the human ability to detect lies and how we perceive them. I began by reading “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News” by Charles Angelucci and Andrea Prat, which provided essential data on voters’ ability to distinguish between true and fake political news. Using the data they collected, I developed various GPT prompts and APIs to categorize their fake news stories into big lies, near-maximum lies, and small lies, using sample data from Politifact.com for training. After refining the prompts for accuracy, I analyzed the categorized data, revealing a balanced distribution across lie types. Logistic regression analyses then showed that big lies and near-maximum lies were less likely to be perceived as true compared to small lies. In addition, reflection scores suggested participants were more skeptical of big lies and reflected more positively on near-maximum lies.

Trading Favors (Charlie Wan ’26)

In this study, I investigated how the passage of time influences the likelihood of reciprocating a favor, and whether introducing additional “high cost” or “high benefit” incentives further mediates the effect of time. Basic regression analyses on survey-collected data revealed that while the passage of time significantly decreased the probability of returning a favor, “high cost” and “high benefit” incentives can counteract this effect. Including additional controls like altruism, risk, and trust – as well as performing stratified analyses based on factors such as context, gender, and student status – further validated the initial results. I then also explored whether the amount of time taken to request a follow-up favor influenced the completion of such follow-up requests. As expected, the results indicated that the amount of time taken to request a follow-up favor significantly affected whether an individual would actually complete it.

Altruism and Attachment (Nathan Shih ’25)

This final study explored the relationship between altruism and the endowment effect. Specifically, we examined whether altruistic behavior could mitigate the cognitive bias of overvaluing owned objects, and looked at whether other factors, such as high altruistic benchmarks and outward-focused framing, could further moderate this effect. Extensive data cleaning and analysis on survey-collected data confirmed the existence of the endowment effect and revealed that altruism, as well as a reminder of social norms and an outward change in perspective, does indeed play a small but significant role in reducing material attachment. This reduction in the endowment effect appears to be specifically due to a decrease in the amount individuals are willing to accept to part with their belongings, rather than an increase in the amount people are willing to pay for similar items. Furthermore, this finding seems to be more prominent with age, and abstract thinkers are particularly likely to experience this reduction in ownership bias.

Manal El Achraoui, Class of 2025

Erin McCloskey, Professor of Education

This summer, I spent 8 weeks conducting research on early childhood education with Professor Erin McCloskey of the Education department. During these 8 weeks I observed three Pre-K classrooms in a Poughkeepsie school and researched aspects of early childhood education such as play, teaching methods, curriculum, and class environment.

The first five weeks of this project, I went to the school and observed the children while taking field notes of my observations. We utilized a more exploratory approach, meaning we did not have an initial research question or focus when we began observing. This flexibility allowed us to notice many different things rather than being limited into looking at one aspect or issue. One of the first observations I made was the expression of gender stereotypes and roles through play. An example of this is how the girls almost always took on caretaker or motherly roles in the group play dynamic. They would cook, clean, and take care of Baby Alive dolls whereas the boys did not display any of these behaviors. I also observed that the lack of male teachers and figures in the classroom may be leading to the boys feeling less connected to the teachers as they don’t relate in certain ways that the teachers and the girls do. This led to the question: How does the background and identity of teachers affect the learning environment and views of the children they teach? 

The last three weeks of this project consisted of coding our field notes and reading books and articles pertaining to early childhood education and gender, identity, race, and other influential factors. This project really expanded my knowledge and experience of education and the early impact it has on children that may continue to influence them as they grow up. I was able to apply my psychology background and look at this from a behavioral perspective as well. Professor Erin McCloskey and I will continue to work together and write our findings to possibly be published later. Thank you, Erin, for this amazing experience. I will use all that I have learned for my future endeavors and experiences.

Abbe Colgan ’26 & Oliver Berger ’26

This summer we worked closely with Professor Andrew Lemon ’00 to develop a 300-level seminar on economic litigation. The work consisted of three phases, and my research will continue into the fall.

As a seminar, the class meets once a week for two hours; each week, students will focus on one court case that uses economic theory to settle the dispute of alleged harm. We wanted to introduce students to different types of economic analysis plaintiffs and defendants use to advance their interests in the courtroom in cases ranging from antitrust to discrimination. In addition, we wanted this course to provide an understanding of the inner workings of a lawsuit, specifically the role of expert witnesses. To further this understanding, we choose to include the initial complaint, the expert witness’ testimonies, and finally, the judge’s opinion as required reading for each case.

Once we decided on the course structure, we turned to finding the actual cases to include on the syllabus. The primary resource we used was Law360, a media site typically used by consulting firms and lawyers to stay updated with recent news in the legal field. It benefited our purposes because it is easy to navigate, and the site boasts summaries and documents related to many cases in the US court system. We were quickly able to scan complaints and read short articles to determine if the case would suit our goals for the course. We were looking at the category each case fell into, the presence of economic expert witnesses, and the fact that the case would use clear, accessible, and engaging economic analysis.

We combined ended up amassing just shy of 60 cases from Law360 that we thought would be interesting. Then, it was time to acquire the necessary documents. This proved to be the most challenging and most lengthy phase of our research. Complaints and Judge’s opinions are usually readily available, often on Law360 itself, but finding the expert reports was the most significant challenge. These reports are often filed under seal because they contain sensitive financial information concerning the parties involved. When filed under seal, the public cannot access the reports, making the case unusable for our purposes. Of the 57 cases we initially flagged as potential candidates, we only had all the documents for twelve.

The last phase of the research, which is still in progress and will continue this fall, is to start putting together the syllabus and discussion questions for the seminar. Each case has an average of 400 pages of reading between all the documents, so as we read these documents and ask ourselves what the most important part is, are there pages/paragraphs that can be cut from the required reading? What should the students taking this class focus on in their discussion? Are additional readings needed to supplement and explain the economic analysis used by the experts? As of August 5th we have gone through three of the cases, my tasks for the fall is to go through all the cases.

Working on this project was rewarding, and we learned a lot about how the economic theory we covered in our classes applies to the real world. We hope this seminar will become a favorite for economics students at Vassar.