BA publication

Undergraduate, Mateen Karimi, Publishes Research

Mateen Karimi, a rising junior majoring in management, published his paper, “The Socioeconomic Integration of Second-Generation MENA Immigrants,” in the journal, Aisthesis, this past June. Each year, the journal publishes a compilation of scholarship completed by students in honors programs nationwide.

Supervised by Professor Furtado, Mateen conducted the analysis for the paper last summer as part of his Holster project.

The article shows that the native-born children of Middle Eastern North African (MENA) immigrants in the United States acquire more education and achieve higher salary incomes than both non-MENA whites and blacks, but falter on employment outcomes as a whole. Interestingly, second-generation Iranians and Yemenis acquire more education than both whites and blacks, but also have the highest unemployment rates.

Prof. Ross to publish in the Review of Economics and Statistics

Prof. Stephen Ross with his co-authors Eric Brunner (BA alumnus) and Ebonya Washington had their paper “Economics and Policy Preferences: Causal Evidence of the Impact of Economic Conditions on Support for Redistribution and Other Ballot Proposals” accepted recently at the Review of Economics and Statistics, one of the leading journals in the profession.

In this paper, they analyze voting data on California ballot propositions between 1990 and 2004 classifying these propositions based on their political leaning (Democrat vs. Republican) and based on the type of proposition (fiscal vs. social). They find strong evidence that positive economic shocks lead to declines in support for redistributive policies using an exogenous proxy for economic shocks based on changes in national employment composition and the composition of worker industry at the neighborhood level. Further, they find that voters behave as if the voters have a preference for consistency in political preferences so that economic shocks have a smaller but similar impact on voting on non-economic ballot issues.