Data Portfolio

Big East basketball 2023

applying lorenz curves to basketball

The Xavier Musketeers are putting on a good show in the tough Big East conference this year! Part of what makes this team special to watch is the depth of the roster. From leading score Souley Boum to 3pt sniper Adam Kunkel, it seems like any person on the roster is liable to go for 20. Coach Sean Miller has done a phenomenal job getting the ball to the players in situations where they have a strong advantage.

While classically the Lorenz curve and the gini index are used to measure income inequality, I thought that I would have some fun by applying these concepts to basketball.

Photo by Keith Jancef, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en, Photo has been modified

Economics Capstone:

The Impact of Winning on College Admission

Abstract: The utility of success in college athletics is often debated by those who have an interest the broader success of institutions of higher education. While some believe that any dollar spent on athletics is a dollar not going towards investing in educational infrastructure, other hold that success in sports can be an effective mechanism for raising the national profile of a university. After adjusting winning based on a teams seeding in the NCAA’s March Madness tournament and using a fixed-effects regression model, we can estimate the causal impact of post-season success in NCAA Division 1 basketball on the quantity of applications that a university receives. We find that success, conditional on expectations, is causally correlated with a 1% increase in the number of applications a schools admission office receives.

Photo by Porterland, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en.

Psychology and recycling

Implementing behavioral economics to improve recycling rates in the city of Cincinnati

Executive Summary: While a lot of progress has been made in altering institutional processes, reinforcing recycling habits at the residential level has been challenging due to the messiness of human behaviour and psychology. We propose that behavioural nudges can be used to reinforce recycling habits and minimize residential recyclables that end up in the landfill. Both increasing the size of the recycling bin and prompting people to make a household recycling should improve residential diversion rates.