This year’s Whittier College Department of Economics Senior Projects tackled topics ranging from the relationship between marriage and economics to financing of terrorist groups in Africa. Eleven students brought awareness about social issues through different economic methodologies used in their projects as they presented in A. J. Villalobos Hall on February 3.
“We have studies that explore the economic effects of hosting the Olympics, the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on neighboring economies, political opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the divergence between the economies of Taiwan and China, and more,” Professor of Economics Roger White said. “As the topics are selected by the students, this variety speaks, I believe, to the uniqueness of individuals who completed the work.”
Sony Hoang ’16 received the Outstanding Senior Project Award for his academic performance in the senior seminar course. Hoang’s project measured the lasting economic impact of tsunamis by looking at countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and India. Hoang utilized a data-focused approach and statistical tools, including econometrics. He found that both Thailand and Indonesia are estimated to have the greatest effects of change on economic factors including tourism and unemployment rate, while Sri Lanka and Japan are the least impacted by tsunamis.
“I would like to thank Professor White who basically told me that I should not economize the word love too much and whose guidance allowed me to take more of a qualitative analysis approach and so I will present the next frontier on economy theory and that is, the relationship between marriage and economics,” student Victor Cornejo ‘16 said as he started his senior presentation.
Cornejo took both a qualitative analysis approach to what he called the “cultural economic institution of marriage,” in which he analyzed its effects on different groups of people according to marriage model of economics that measures the distance between proximity, history, social stigma benefits, ideal match, and human capital.
Cornejo found that amongst every combination of family; married, step parent cohabiting, and single parents, that married couples are least likely to live in poverty and that means that their children are less likely to suffer. “Marriage is a good indicator of productivity,” said Cornejo. “It is good individually for men because they tend to grow and are thus more productive.
He also pointed out that although married couples are the most successful in our economy, single mothers are the ones that suffer the most and are more likely to live in poverty. “This is troubling because we also see that marriage actually affects ethnicity differently,” Cornejo said.
Cornejo concluded by suggesting that as the number of educated women has increased over time, so has the change in relationship dynamics and thus, we should consider other variables in measuring the benefits of marriage.
Moise Bongoyok ’16 examined the financing of terrorist groups in Africa for his senior project. He estimated the magnitude of illicit or illegally earned financial flows among terrorist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram, Lord’s resistance army and al-Shabaab in comparison to global level of financial flows in Africa. “ I think over the past 2 and half years there have been a lot of new challenges and more equations to solve,” Bongoyok said. “Violence around the world has increased in relation to the past 10 years so for my project I decided to look at one thing that was touching me at home personally Boka Haram and Christian terrorism in Africa which was the main reason for research.”
Bongoyok employed both qualitative/descriptive tools and statistical methods. Accurate tracing of financial flows was a challenge to Bongoyok because of what he referred to as undetected forms of funds in terrorist financing including money earned from drug cartels, contingent money stolen by politicians, money lost, and fraudulent transactions.
“Given the variety of topics chosen by the students and the potential pitfalls of empirical analysis that they avoided, my impressions are that each demonstrated considerable understanding of what to do and, perhaps more importantly, what not to do,” White said. “They are an impressive group of Whittier students and I expect big things from them in the coming years.”
by Lightmary Flores '17
