B.S. in Economics Senior Thesis
Bangladesh and its Quest to Becoming a Middle Income Country: evaluating the relationship between higher education in women and economic development
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Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which higher education for women influences economic development in Bangladesh. Two models using OLS regressions were employed to evaluate the strengths of two critical relationships. The first probed the connection between higher education in women and the female labour force participation rate, while the second tested the relationship between higher education in women and GDP per capita. The first key finding is that there is no statistically significant relationship between higher education in women and FLFPR. The second main finding is that there is a statistically significant relationship between higher education in women and GDP per capita. The results imply that a good path forward in Bangladesh’s development may lie in making more concentrated efforts to strengthen female tertiary education programs.
M.Sc. in Business Economics, Specialization Neuroeconomics Master Thesis
Emotional Induction and Parochial Altruism: probing how certain affective states facilitate and hinder parochial punishment across political affiliations
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Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role certain affective states (fear and anger) play on facilitating and hindering parochial altruism. The central behavioral hypothesis is that the emotion, anger, is expected to help facilitate parochially altruistic behavior while the emotion, fear, will potentially hinder it. Emotion was induced by exposing participants (N=85) to one of three video clips that elicit anger (Schindler’s List), fear (Blair Witch Project), and neutral (How It’s Made: Curling Stone) affective states respectively. One of the key findings of this study is that fear appeared to have had a more pronounced effect on parochial punishment amount than the other two affective states. However, this result was not statistically significant at a 5% level. Subsequent OLS and mixed-model regressions also did not yield statistical significance beyond the 0.05 threshold, with the exception of expressive suppression being a statistically significant determinant of parochial punishment for a crossed random effects regression. Further investigation on expressive suppression and very strong political affiliation influencing parochial punishment is warranted for drawing any substantial conclusions. A future neuroscientific investigation involving the dmPFC is proposed in the discussion.