My Ford Scholars project this summer was focused on the effects of different types of financial crises (systemic banking, exchange rate and sovereign debt crises) on sectoral value added and employment. Even though a large amount of literature has been dedicated to exploring the impact of crises on the overall level of output, only few papers research the changes in the individual sectors. In this context, the paper “The Cost of Financial Crises: A Sectoral Analysis” provides a relevant contribution to the existing literature by estimating the magnitude of the effect of crises on agriculture, industry and services.

Working with Professor Islamaj, we collected data on sectoral value added and employment from the World Bank and the Groningen Growth and Development Center database and used Stata (a statistical software) to perform analysis on the effect of the occurrence of crises episodes in both emerging markets and developing economies. The data on crises is obtained from three main data sources – Levi-Yeyatti and Panizza, Leavan and Valencia, and Reinhart and Rogoff. The preliminary research showed evidence that banking crises lead to longer recoveries in sectors heavily dependent on external finance. Furthermore, exchange rate crises do not have as severe effect on sectors that are primarily export-oriented because currency depreciation increases firms’ competitiveness. Our results are consistent with these hypotheses.

Another method of determining the differences in the cost of financial crises across sectors is by looking at the duration and amplitude of the sectoral “episodes”, where duration is defined as the time period during which sectoral value added decreases and similarly, amplitude is defined as the change in value added in the year following the occurrence of a crises. The two tables below show our findings. The industrial sector is more severely affected by debt and banking crises, with drop in output lasting 0.588 and 0.524 years on average. However, the results for amplitude show a larger negative impact of banking crises compared to debt crises (1.47% and 0.55% respectively). In addition, banking crises leads to an increase in the value added of agriculture and a decrease in the service sector. Interestingly, value added in the three sectors increases after the occurrence of a currency crises.

Table 1: Crises Duration

Table 2: Crises Amplitude

My involvement in the project consisted primarily of carrying out a literature review on previous papers researching similar and related topics, obtaining and organizing data, and writing do-files (text files containing commands to be executed by the statistical software Stata).

Embodying Compassion in Buddhist Art: Image, Pilgrimage, Practice

This coming spring, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College will host an exhibition centered on the topic of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Professor Lucic and I spent the summer working on planning and research for this exhibition, a multifaceted job.

Research was an important part of my work as a Ford Scholar, particularly finding and organizing research on the various works of art. The bibliography of the exhibition’s catalog was a huge undertaking. The process of creating and editing a bibliography of this size is extremely time consuming, but also very important, as the sources that we cite will be useful for people trying to find further information on these works. This exhibition features an incredible collection of works from all over the world, and will therefore be very important for scholars or students trying to gain a further understanding of imagery of Avalokiteshvara.

One large part of my work was correspondence with various organizations regarding rights for reproductions of images of the works that we would be using in the catalog. The complexity of the bureaucratic aspects of organizing an exhibition was a surprise to me as a student of Art History. Negotiations regarding the conservation of works of art, the cost of transportation or care, the reproduction of images and the credit given to organizations took up a lot of my time. This was extremely interesting, particularly because it was a first glimpse in to the reality of working in the art world.

I also had the chance to collaborate with Professor Lucic on the creation of a website and smartphone application related to the exhibition, which will be released with the catalog and exhibition. Work on the website, smartphone application, catalog, and exhibition is ongoing, as Professor Lucic works with a class of Vassar students in her seminar, Embodying Compassion in Buddhist Art: A Curatorial Training.

This summer I have been working with Professor Evsen Turkay on the project that studies the relationship between a firm’s competitiveness and the level of integration between the upstream firm and downstream firm. We define the level of integration by evaluating how closely up and downstream firms are interrelated. The more interrelated the firms are, the higher level of vertical integration. Our hypothesis has been that, because higher level of vertical integration implies more information exchanges between the upstream and downstream firm, the better chance it will be for the upstream firms to avoid uncertainty and risk in research and development because they have better information about what products are being demanded at the moment. As a result, they tend to be more competitive and will take up more market share than other firms.

We started our research by getting the market information of lithium-ion battery industry (upstream firms) in which we discovered that: 1. Although U.S. has been the top-notch developer of technology in this area, Asian firms took the largest market share.  2. Asian firms seem to be more vertically integrated than the U.S. firms. 3. Other kind of advantages of Asian firms, such low labor costs, do not take a huge share in entire cost of production. 4. Other costs in production, such as material costs, are not basically the same for firms all over the world. All the information allows us to make the corollary that level of vertical integration decides the outcome of such unbalanced market share.

Then we took automobile industry (electric automobile industry) as the downstream firms of our research and found the market share of those automobile manufacturers. We then researched the relationship between those electric car manufacturers and lithium-ion battery providers and classified their relationships according to closeness of their corporation from the degree 0 to 3. “3” represents the greatest level of integration, usually the relationship between a mother firm and its subsidiary and “0” represents basically no close relationship between up and downstream firms. We discovered that in the downstream market, the firms which have at least some kind of vertical integration (degree range from 1.5-3) for example, joint venture and some research agreement takes up 78% of the market share which shows the advantage of such high vertical integration and affirms our hypothesis. We also looked through small electronic markets such as cellphone market, laptop market, and tablet market, which also use lithium-ion batteries and got the same result.

Improvement that should be Made and Afterwards:  all the hypothesis and corollary we got above requires too many assumptions that are shouldn’t be ruled out in the real world. We have tried to eliminate them through more careful research on price, unit cost, research and development costs of those upstream firms and hoped to fit them in the model that professor Turkay constructed. However, we were not able to do so because most of such information is commercially confidential. We also discovered that, there could be other factors that cause the resulting market share even though we have eliminated many of them. Next step will be to find more factors that will probably affect the outcome of our research and find other ways of searching those data.

It is believed that opium production in Mexico began in the late 19th century and trafficking to the U.S. in the early 20th century. While illegal drug production in Mexico has been under the spotlight for a longtime, immigration knowledge spillovers on such activities are a rather unique way to look at this issue. This summer I worked with Professor Sarah Pearlman and her co-author Emily Owens on a research project focusing on the role that knowledge spillover from Chinese immigration to Mexico played on the development of Mexican opium production.

From reviewing relevant history papers and literatures, we have gained insights about factors contributed to Chinese immigration to Mexico and its geographical distribution. After the British abolishment of slave trade in 1830s, the United States received a large amount of Chinese laborers due to Gold Rush and First Transcontinental Railroad. However, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricted the entry of Chinese to the United States. Chinese population, especially in California where over 80% Chinese born population in US resided in 1880, experienced a dramatic drop in terms of both total and percentage population. In the meantime, modernization movement in Mexico created domestic labor shortages, resulting in more welcoming immigration policies such as offering citizenship to Chinese migrants. As a result, Chinese population in Mexico showed consecutive increase and reached peak on 1920, according to historical census data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI) in Mexico.

(Total number of Chinese immigrants in Mexico; Source: INEGI)

We analyzed INEGI’s census data from 1895 to 1940 in STATA. We found out that northern states were target destinations of this inflow of Chinese immigration in Mexico, while the majority of total national population at that time was located in the south near Mexico City. Due to social and economic ties between Chinese immigrants in the US (especially California) and Mexico, as well as the fact that Mexico was the first step of illegal entries to the US for some Chinese immigrants, most of destination states are boarder States. For instance, Sonora is at the south of Arizona and Baja California is next to California. We have constructed maps to visually illustrate this concentrated distribution by merging GIS information into STATA

.

Interestingly, our preliminary assessment of opium poppy cultivation trends in Mexico shows that many popular destinations of Chinese immigrants are now major opium producing states. Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa are top states in terms of poppy plant seizures according to Mexican government records in 2005. Since current poppy cultivation is influenced by field visibility, effectiveness of law enforcement, eradication efforts and other factors as poppy cultivation became illegal in 1926, we looked back to historical data about poppy cultivation, preferably before 1930. From Penafiel Yearbook of Mexico obtained from archives in UCLA library, I found municipal level agricultural census of various crops, yet poppy was not recorded. These census data may help us in comparing distributions of poppy and plant whose suitability is similar to poppy. I also found state level opium production from the same documents. Meanwhile, we are trying to construct an index of agro-climatic suitability for poppy in order to locate areas in Mexico that are naturally suitable for poppy cultivation. To aid the research I consulted geography professors and collected maps from atlas and some GIS files.

Although up till now the relationship between immigration and opium production in Mexico remains unclear, throughout the summer we have well traced Chinese immigration inflow to Mexico and understood reasons of this migration, which are essential fundamentals for future research on this topic. 

Overview: My primary research this summer was with Benjamin Ho on a project about the value of explanations in social settings. For example, let’s say you take the last cookie from the cookie jar. Once someone notices the last cookie missing, there are a variety of ways in which you might explain yourself: apology (“I’m sorry!”), guilt (“Oops, I feel terrible!”), and selfishness (“Too bad, I wanted the cookie!”) amongst others. We set out to determine the different types of explanations people give, the circumstances in which they arise, the strategies that people employ when explaining themselves, and whether people actually change their behavior as a result of past explanations (i.e., after saying sorry, one might expect less selfish behavior).

Process: First, we needed a way to obtain explanations. For this, we created an online survey (http://goo.gl/xtshAl) and turned to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform, to send it to people all over the country. Participants in the experiment are given money for completing simple tasks. They then have the option to take money from other participants, profiting more for themselves at the expense of others. After they make a decision about how much money to take, participants are asked to explain their actions to their partners. Some of the “takers” know about this explanation ahead of time; they have more information on the basis of which to make decisions regarding how much money to take. In other treatments, we vary the takers’ ability to pay to avoid sending an explanation or to guarantee that an explanation is sent. The experiment is then repeated three times with different people. Lastly, we vary both the money awarded to takers (ascending vs. descending payoffs in each round) and the timing of the explanation in the experimental process.

Brief summary of results: We obtained over 1850 responses in the three rounds of our survey. Five MTurk users sorted each explanation we collected, and tests for robustness confirmed adequate sorting. Below is a summary of people’s take rates versus the type of explanation they gave.

We found that a majority (55%) of people wanted to take any money at all from their partners, suggesting that many people are unselfish, even when using a platform like MTurk that is designed solely for their profit. Of those who took any money, the average take rate was around 45%, but it varied wildly by type of explanation sent. Those apologizing or admitting to selfishness took the most; those who were honest or fair in their explanation took the least; those who admitted to being guilty took the average. Only 11% wanted to pay to make sure their explanations were or were not sent, and most of these people tended to send guilty explanations even though guilty people behaved in the most average manner of any group of explanation-senders. We did not find largely significant changes in behavior across rounds of the experiment, so there is evidence to suggest that people’s behaviors are not calculated in a split second but rather formulated in a longer-term way. Additionally, people who were informed ahead of time about the future explanation took less than average by about 12%, and those who could pay to avoid the explanations took more than average by over 5%.

Afterwards & moving forwards: I gave a talk explaining these results at the BEEMA conference at Haverford this June entitled “The Present Value of Future Explanations.” In addition, the Economics faculty at Vassar have helped us greatly in the process of designing our experiment and analyzing our findings. As we finalize our understanding of the mechanisms at work behind people’s behaviors in the context of explanations, I will be writing up our results for publication sometime this fall.

The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970.  After almost fifty years of environmental activism, however, the most profound challenges facing our globe, including climate change, pollution, and resource depletion, have yet to be adequately addressed.  While studying the current environmental movements and theory is crucial to understanding our present crises, it is even more important to encourage students, not to follow in their predecessors’ footsteps, but to conceptualize new forms of dissent that might be more successful at inciting agency and substantial change than past efforts. This summer, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Pinar Batur, Director of Environmental Studies, to create the syllabi for two Environmental Studies Senior Seminars in which the participants will evaluate current political and economic structures and seek to imagine more successful counter-protest movements.  Both of these seminars include class projects where students address a corresponding environmental issue on campus and the Hudson Valley to foster praxis.

SENIOR SEMINAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: LET’S TALK TRASH!

The first Senior Seminar syllabus I organized with Professor Batur was “Let’s Talk Trash,” which focuses on all aspects of waste including the American culture of disposability, the production of waste in a capitalist system, and the unsustainable dumping of all of this trash into landfills, incinerators, and waterways.  This seminar also studies how waste became a form of environmental racism as most waste disposal areas are disproportionately placed in poor, minority communities and analyzes the social movements that erupted as a response to these injustices. The seminar will culminate with a class project that uses Vassar as a center for a comprehensive anti-trash movement by focusing on food waste at Vassar, sustainable systems and trash education in the area, and recycling.

SENIOR SEMINAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: DISSENT IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

The second syllabus I worked on combined many different types of readings such as plays and novels with social theory and environmental research to give students a broad theoretical understanding of dissent in the context of environmental movements.  This seminar will specifically focus on climate change with discussions on the shortcomings of the current political and social responses and projects that challenge students to conceptualize other forms of dissent that will incite more international agency on this pressing issue. This seminar has been scheduled for the Spring 2015.

Student Project:  I also had the opportunity to work on an independent project.  I chose to research and document the role of Vassar College and Alumni in dissent and its various articulations.  I have contacted and interviewed Vassar alumni who work in the “environmental field” including lobbying, agriculture, business, and nonprofit organizations.  In these interviews, I will aim to find out how Vassar students begin a career in the environmental field and understand if and how these students can create a culture of dissent from the status quo while working within current power structures.

Our project explores the link between migration and health. Specifically, we examine the effect of internal migration (the movement of people within their country) on the health of immigrant retirees. There is a growing literature on the health impacts of retirement, but not much work has explored the relationship between movement and health. Atella and Deb (2014) shows that Italian women in poor health showed significant improvements in health from moving from the South of Italy to the North. Stillman, McKenzie, and Gibson (2009) use evidence from a randomized immigration lottery in New Zealand to find that immigrating to a new country has a positive impact on mental health, especially for those in the lower end of the mental health distribution before immigrating. Previous literature seems to suggest that retirement also has a positive impact on health. Most published papers on this topic, including Insler (2014) and Neuman (2008) use instrumental variables to estimate the health impact of retirement. A notable exception to the general trend of the literature, Dave, Rashad, and Spasojevic (2008) suggests that retirement actually has a small negative effect on health.

Building on this previous research, we have used data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) released monthly by the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate the differences between the health of immigrant and native retirees. These two groups differ significantly by a number of characteristics, such as family size, age, and educational attainment. As a result, it is natural to expect that immigrant and native retirees will have different health levels. The graph below shows the portion of immigrant and native retirees who have moved in the past year that report being in good health. This suggests that immigrant retirees are less healthy as a group than natives, though this might be due to demographic differences between the two groups and not merely a result of immigration status.

Similar preliminary research found that stayers were more likely to be in good health than movers, though this might be because many retirees move due to poor health. The small sample size of immigrant movers in the CPS for any given year made it difficult to assess whether moving had a similar negative association with health when comparing immigrant movers and stayers.

It remains unclear whether immigrant and native retirees and movers and stayers vary in health outcomes as a result of their movement status or due to differences in the composition of the groups. Future research will attempt to determine the causal effect of movement on the health of immigrant retirees. We hope to use the Health and Retirement Survey, a dataset which follows the same group of retired individuals over time, to more accurately assess the impacts of movement within a country on health. This dataset will include zip code data that will allow us to get a richer description of the movements of retirees within the US.

First, to fully understand the type of laser data that I would be working with for my Ford project, I was able to experience the process of conducting a laser survey first-hand and then to toy with the resulting data, creating rotatable sections, and viewing the building in a virtual, three-dimensional space with true to life color.

performing a high-definition laser survey of the Vassar Chapel

three-dimensional representations of the Chapel comprised of the millions of points procured during the laser survey that can be observed from all angles and sliced into any desired sections 

Chartres Cathedral

Bourges Cathedral

During my time in the Ford Scholar Program, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Andrew Tallon in creating the first truly accurate, non-rectified plans of the Gothic churches of Chartres and Bourges. Using sections of laser data that reveal the wonderful irregularities of these structures, which have been set in place after centuries of shifting and settling and have gone mostly undocumented, we have managed to represent, with great precision, the churches as they stand today. These new, laser-based plans expose the realities of the structures as never before and will add new depths to the study of these major, art historical buildings.

-Destin McMurry (’16)