Paid Research Assistant
Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC
Conducted supervised research in graph theory under professors in the mathematics department.
Applied bootstrap percolation, probability, and proofs by induction to estimate the spread of infections diseases and how they interact with immunity and recovery.
Presented research at two seperate events hosted by Winthrop University.
Supervised Undergraduate Research
Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC
Topic: The Effect of Paper Mill Emissions on Local Health Outcomes.
Completed undergraduate research in the Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics.
Collected and organized ACS and pollution data, conducted causal analysis using dif-and-dif quasi-experimental models and regressions, and made public recommendations based on results.
Found that the opening of a local paper mill had led to a statistically significant increase in adverse health effects in the affected areas. Concluded that existing policy was ineffective due its lack of strong enforcement and monitoring.
Revisions on this paper are still in progress.
Capstone Research Project
Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC
Topic: Intergenerational Mobility of Education: Parent's College Completion on Their Children's Learning Outcomes
Collected, cleaned, and organized ACS data, and used Stata and R to run different OLS regressions.
Found that an individual's learning outcomes are greatly correlated to the outcomes of their parents. Recommended research design improvements for future to further isolate a causal relationship.
Presented findings in a short presentation.
Econometrics Project
Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC
Topic: The Effect of GDP on Carbon Dioxide Emissions.
Tested the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) theory using publicly available data from The World Bank.
Gathered, organized, and cleaned data using Stata, conducted various regressions and tests, and provided policy recommendations based on analysis.
Found that the theorized pattern presented by the EKC has rarely been observed, but concluded that this was explainable by several relevant factors. Recommended targeted policy implementations to try and ensure better emission outcomes.
Presented a 20 minute lecture on my work.
Excerpt from my Capstone Research Project
I began with the analysis on college completion chances based on the number of parents in the household with a college degree. These results appear in Figure 5 in the appendix. The first regression includes the same controls and design as the other three, including robust standard errors. For college completion rate, coefficients yielded a 5.2 percentage point increase in likelihood if one parent was a college graduate, and a 21.5 percentage point increase in likelihood if both parents had graduated. This finding was shown to statistically not be zero in both cases. This tracks with ideas put forward by other economists, who found the strict causal relationship between the factors to be a positive one, albeit slightly less strong. Other interesting factors that came into play were race, income, and family total income. The coefficient for family total income on college completion was .000000571 per dollar. When scaling this up to every $10,000 the coefficient becomes .00571. Therefore, the regression indicates that an individual’s likelihood of graduating college increases by .5% for every $10,000 their family makes. Another result I found interesting was SNAP, which showed a -.0481 coefficient, indicating that a person on snap is roughly 4 percentage points less likely to graduate from college.