This paper examines the relationship between cities hosting Presidential Nominating Conventions and economic growth, measured by city GDP, employment rate and tourism through an event study. Additionally, this paper looks at the impact of key convention-related infrastructure investments and the size of the host city to see if either of these factors affected the host city’s post-convention long-term GDP. Previous research on the subject was limited, and failed to find any meaningful correlation between hosting a convention and economic growth, while related research on short-term events and economic growth has resulted in a wide spectrum of results. Compared to their own pre-convention trends and relative to large host cities, the data revealed that small host cities showed significant increases in both short and long-run GDP. However, there is no significant general trend in GDP, employment or tourism for host cities, relative to both pre-convention trends and would-be host cities, and there is no indication that the key infrastructure investment led to long term growth, although it led to a small, non-statistically significant, short term boost.

Since its federal legalization in 2018, sports betting has become an increasingly important segment of American entertainment spending. While the effects of this change on the sportsbook industry and government revenues have been extensively studied, there has been limited exploration of its impact on the sports industry itself. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by looking at operating incomes, salary expenditures, and pre-salary operating incomes of teams in the four major American professional sports leagues. Specifically, I utilize franchise financial data from Forbes and Spotrac to perform a linear regression of franchise financials on sports betting handles and team characteristics. Additionally, I employ a staggered difference-in-differences regression to analyze the impact of state-by-state legalization on franchise financials. My findings indicate that federal sports betting legalization has increased the operating income of American professional sports franchises. However, I also observe a brief decrease in pre-salary operating income following in-state legalization, though franchise health returns to normal after the first few years. Furthermore, I find that the operating incomes and pre-salary operating incomes of the largest quartile of franchises in each league have been negatively affected by in-state sports betting legalization. This suggests that revenues from legalization may be distributed primarily through shared revenue channels, such as television deals and sportsbook partnerships. Overall, this study provides evidence that sports betting legalization is reshaping the competitive dynamics of franchise financials in the sports ecosystem. This development is of heightened importance given the increase in private investments in sports franchises as well as the emergence of new betting markets.

The dramatic increase in the cost of higher education since the 1980s has eroded public confidence in American colleges and universities. Although elite private institutions have been able to raise prices due to high consumer willingness to pay, particular features of the education market have made a high-tuition, high-aid model the norm among most colleges. As a result, the advertised “sticker price” has increasingly diverged from the “net price” students pay after receipt of grants and scholarships.

Net price has accordingly replaced tuition as the key independent variable in the economics literature examining the effects of the rising cost of higher education on multiple student outcomes. However, net price is often defined inconsistently. This paper offers a concise and repeatable definition of average net price - based on data provided by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) - and uses this to study the effect of shock to net price on multiple outcomes.

Several studies have investigated the effect of changes to the net price of college on post-college outcomes (such as earnings and homeownership). Studies considering the effects of changing net price on currently enrolled students have focused on enrollment and persistence. I model the effect of large discrete positive shocks to net price on student satisfaction, goals, and employment using two-way fixed-effects event study models (with binary and continuous treatment). The evidence presented suggests that shocks to the net price of college increase contemporaneous self-reported student satisfaction, a finding that supports theories from behavioral economics stating that high prices are associated with high quality. Supplemental analyzes (including propensity score modeling and an examination of differential responses to net price shocks across income groups) reveal the complex matrix of student and college characteristics that moderate the effect of prices on outcomes. Based on this, I argue for increased granularity in future work on the effects of prices on student outcomes.

University endowments play a central role in higher education finance, serving as a long-term financial tool that supports institutional operations. Given this role, further research is needed to understand how endowments interact with tuition pricing, especially during periods of economic downturns. This paper investigates the relationship between endowment performance and tuition costs by diving into how endowments function as financial tools during economic recessions and whether their impact differs between public and private universities. Using a dataset of high-endowment universities from 2003 to 2022, this study runs a multi-model Difference-in-Differences regression to analyze how endowment levels, institutional type, and macroeconomic conditions influence tuition-setting behavior. This paper found that while economic recessions correlate with decreased endowment performance, they don’t directly lead to tuition increases. Instead, macroeconomic indicators, such as unemployment, are more predictive of rising tuition. Although private universities maintain higher tuition and endowment levels than public universities, their spending practices during downturns are limited by long-term financial planning principles and donor restrictions. This paper challenges assumptions about endowment efficacy and highlights the limitations of current strategies while offering a foundation for future research surrounding institutional resilience and student affordability during economic stress.

The field of computer and information technology has grown and continues to grow at a pace unmatched by other fields. This has led to increased attention by policy- makers to prioritize the expansion of computer science education in K-12. This e!ort was spearheaded by U.S. President, Barack Obama through his “Computer Science for All” initiative through which he allocated billions for the states to develop K-12 computer science education with an emphasis on educational equity. Using an event study di!erence-in-di!erences framework, I investigate the impact of the state poli- cies requiring computer science classes be taught at every public high school, passed largely in the wake of this initiative, on student major attainment and subsequent labor market outcomes. I find that expansion in CS access does not significantly af- fect the share of CS degrees attained nor the wages of early career associate’s degree graduates. This is in line with prior work and suggests that CS access a!ects student outcomes in so far as it induces students to take CS courses in high school.