My mother was born behind the Iron Curtain in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The communist government stole her family’s belongings and forced them to work demanding physical labor jobs. Wishing for a better life, her family illegally fled across the border and immigrated to America in 1968. The communist government eventually fell in 1989 due to the Velvet Revolution, an anti-communist protest fueled by an economic downturn. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia’s first democratic elections established a new government that transformed the economy by moving company ownership from the state to private entities.

I began my journey into research in 10th grade (2020). Covid-19 was the style du jour, masks were all the rage, and I was enrolling in a class at my school called Science Research. This class was meant to guide students, helping them reach out to experienced mentors in academia and industry. Initially, I was tasked with finding a broad area of study, for example, cancer, in which I could later specify and find a niche that fit me precisely.

Like so many others, COVID-19 has had a major impact on my life. My home state, New York was caught unprepared for the pandemic, at great loss. The ensuing response from government and private entities was scattered at best, and at times dangerous. The immense impact COVID has had on my family, community and country inspired me to research it. As the shock of a pandemic began to wear off, and states began reopening, conjectures about the differences between parties and states were widely articulated in the media and public discourse, with little data to support it.

Starting from a young age, I had seen people in my life suffer as a result of domestic violence as well as seen and experienced firsthand the stress associated with financial instability. In 2020, the first case COVID-19 was reported in America, thus sparking the news to be flooded with stories of the toll this pandemic was taking on our well-being and the economy. Due to my understanding of the connection between relationship and economic instability from personal experiences, I became concerned about how the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic could affect marital relationships … For many individuals, being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck or based on future paychecks is their reality (Cecchetti et al.

Economics was a subject I first discovered in high school a class that all students were required to take which inexplicitly became my favorite class of the year. I was enthralled by the idea of using mathematics to model the behavior of individuals and firms across the country. Until I met my mentor Professor Cheng-Zhong Qin, that is how I saw economics: a collection of simple and elegant theories that described all of economic activity.

It was a routine Thanksgiving dinner at our home on Long Island. Amidst the light banter, I overheard a troubling conversation between two sets of grandparents. One was describing the upcoming trips and recreational activities they were planning with their peers from both Florida and New York, where they had residences. The other couple was struggling to determine if the man-hours they were dedicating to their small retail business was cost effective as their income was slowing to almost a halt.