Class Action: Homeless in high school, Jessica Boyle fought to make Colby a place where students from all backgrounds can thrive

Once a homeless teen, Jessica Boyle ’12 worked to make Colby a place where students like her can thrive.

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Modeling Clean Energy A New Home Sweet Home Opening a Dialogue Walking in Someone Else's Shoes Delayed Reaction, Strong Occupation New Affiliation with Columbia Same Place, Different Mission Giving Marriage a New Ring TwitterFEED Microcosm of a Small World

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Tony Blair to Speak at Commencement Science Building Gets Go-Ahead Spike Lee Does the Colby Thing Historian Leonard Awarded Lincoln Prize Presidential Preview Show by Mike Daisey Creates Nationwide Controversy President Adams as Art Curator Chen Wins Peace Grant--Again Qin Awarded Watson Fellowship Roots in Slavery Tell Bigger Story TwitterFEED A (Real) Virtual Community Corrado Tapped as Expert on Super PACs

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A Touch of Glass Witness to History Colby Renews "No-Loan" Commitment Fresh Idea The Anthropology of Air Travel Oak Fellow Fights India's Caste System If the Ring Fits… TwitterFEED New Maisel Fund Opens Doors to the World Goodbye, Oil (Almost)

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Passion Defines Grads Colby Dumps Bottled Water Bullish on Colby: 2011 Graduates Find Success in Tight Market Four Fulbright Fellows; Projects for Peace Winners Hanson Scholar Feels an Affinity Philosophy Prof's Advice: "Plastikos" TwitterFEED Update: Nick Tucker '11J Student Entrepreneurs Win Start-Up Cash Schwalm '99 Shoots NFL Photo of the Year Rising Senior Wins Jeapardy! Admitting the Illustrious Class of 2015

Class Act: Dean of Admissions Parker Beverage retires after helping to enroll more than 11,000 Colby students

Over a quarter century of hard work, retiring Dean of Admissions Parker Beverage had a hand in Colby’s steady rise.

Decomposing Consumer Wealth Effects: Evidence on the Role of Real Estate Assets Following the Wealth Cycle of 1990-2002

During the period of 1990-2002 US households experienced a dramatic wealth cycle, induced by a 369% appreciation in the value of real per capita liquid stock market assets followed by a 55% decline. However, consumer spending in real terms continued to rise throughout this period. Using data from 1990-2005, traditional life-cycle approaches to estimating macroeconomic wealth effects confront two puzzles: (i) econometric evidence of a stable cointegrating relationship among consumption, income, and wealth is weak at best; and (ii) life-cycle models that rely on aggregate measures of wealth cannot explain why consumption did not collapse when the value of stock market assets declined so dramatically. We address both puzzles by decomposing wealth according to the liquidity of household assets. We find that the significant appreciation in the value of real estate assets that occurred after the peak of the wealth cycle helped sustain consumer spending from 2001 to 2005.

Globalization, Agency, and Institutional Innovation: The Rise of Public-Private Partnerships in Global Governance

Public and private actors increasingly cooperate in global governance, a realm previously reserved for states and intergovernmental organizations (IOs). This trend raises fascinating theoretical questions. What explains the rise in public-private institutions and their role in international politics? Who leads such institutional innovation and why? To address the questions, this paper develops a theory of the political demand and supply of public-private institutions and specifies the conditions under which IOs and non-state actors would cooperate, and states would support this public-private cooperation. The observable implications of the theoretical argument are evaluated against the broad trends in public-private cooperation and in a statistical analysis of the significance of demand and supply-side incentives in public-private cooperation for sustainable development. The study shows that public-private institutions do not simply fill governance gaps opened by globalization, but cluster in narrower areas of cooperation, where the strategic interests of IOs, states, and transnational actors intersect.

Religion and Subjective Well-Being Among China’s Elderly Population

Evidence from developed and developing countries alike demonstrates a strongly positive relationship between religiosity and happiness, particularly for women and particularly among the elderly. Using survey data from the oldest old in China, we find a strong negative relationship between religious participation and subjective well-being in a rich multivariate logistic framework that controls for demographics, health and disabilities, living arrangements and marital status, wealth and income, lifestyle and social networks, and location. In contrast to other studies, we also find that religion has a larger effect on subjective well-being on men than women.

Local Distributional Effects of Government Cash Transfers in Chile

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and regional levels. The impact of cash subsidies to poor households on local inequality is thus not well understood. Using poverty-mapping methods to asses this impact, we find heterogeneity in the effectiveness of regional and municipal governments in reducing inequality via poverty-reduction transfers, suggesting that alternative targeting regimes may complement current practice in aiding the poor.

Candidate Quality and Voter Response in U.S. House Elections

We propose and test the implications of a two-dimensional concept of candidate quality in U.S. House elections. Strategic quality is composed of the skills and resources necessary to wage an effective campaign; personal quality is composed of the characteristics most ordinary citizens value in their leaders and representatives, such as personal integrity and dedication to public service. We employ district informants in studies of the 1998 and 2002 congressional elections to measure these qualities in candidates, and we merge mass survey data with the district informant indicators to assess constituents’ awareness and evaluation of House candidates, and voting choice. We find that awareness tends to be responsive to candidates’ strategic quality, and that incumbent evaluation is remarkably responsive to variation in personal quality, even taking into account the quality of challenger emergence. These and other findings appear to support a more positive view of citizen capacity than is common in the congressional elections literature, especially in light of the electoral security of House incumbents.

Spatial Inequality in Chile

Despite success in reducing poverty over the last twenty years, inequality in Chile has remained virtually unchanged, making Chile one of the least equal countries in the world. High levels of inequality have been shown to hamper further reductions in poverty as well as economic growth and local inequality has been shown to affect such outcomes as violence and health. The study of inequality at the local level is thus crucial for understanding the economic well-being of a country. Local measures of inequality have been difficult to obtain, but recent theoretical advances have enabled the combination of survey and census data to obtain estimators of inequality that are robust at disaggregated geographic levels. In this paper, we employ this methodology to produce consistent estimators of inequality for every county in Chile. We find a great deal of variation in inequality, with county-level Gini coefficients ranging from 0.41 to 0.63.

Meeting the Standards: An Analysis of Eight Grade Educational Assesment Test Scores in Maine

This paper examines the impact of socioeconomic factors on eighth grade achievement test scores in the face of federal and state initiatives for educational reform in Maine. We use student-level data over a five year period to provide a framework for understanding the policy implications of these initiatives. We model performance on standardized tests using a seemingly unrelated regressions approach and then determine the likelihood of meeting the standards defined by the adequate yearly progress requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act and Maine Learning Results initiatives. Our results indicate that the key factors influencing a student’s test scores include the education of a student’s parents, special services received for learning disabilities, and alternative measures of academic achievement.

Analysis of Optimum Location, Viability, and Potential Effects of Wind Farm Construction in Maine

Maine has the highest potential for wind energy in New England and falls within the top twenty states in the nation. It falls just behind Wisconsin and California with an estimate electrical output of 56 billion kWhs. The geological makeup of Maine’s mountains in the western part of the state, and the exposed coastline provide opportune areas to capture wind and convert it into energy. The information included in this poster will suggest the most likely areas for wind development based on a number of factors as recommended by the American Wind Energy Association.

Predator Survival Tactics and Use of Habitat Cover in Rana Catesbeiana.

Predator-prey relationships are an important aspect of the natural world, and, because of its relevance to survival and natural selection, is an interesting relationship to study. In amphibian larvae, level of activity and landscape use are often what determines the survival as prey. I studied the anti-predator behavior of the North American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) tadpoles when presented with dragonfly (Aeshna) larvae, a known predator of tadpoles. Tadpoles were acclimated to four different habitats with varying degrees of habitat cover, and were transferred to a new habitat with a degree of cover equal to one of the acclimation tanks. A restrained predator, and thus its chemical cue, was introduced, and the behavior, particularly the use of the habitat cover to hide from the perceived risk of predation was observed. A significantly higher frequency of inactivity was found in tank I than in II and III, and inactivity followed a general trend of decreasing with increasing habitat cover. Difference in tank cover was not found to have a significant effect on swimming behavior, but did have a significant effect on hiding behavior, which increased with higher availability. Foraging decreased significantly with the addition of a predator, but did not vary significantly with different levels of cover. Hiding behavior and reducing conspicuous behaviors (like foraging) are probably the behaviors that afford the tadpole the most success at eluding a predator in their natural environment.