Research

Welcome to the research section of my website.  Below you will find links to my current working papers and works in progress as well as my research agenda.  My current research revolves around measurements of instructional quality in higher education, specifically grades as a measurement of student learning and students’ evaluations of their instructors as measurements of teaching quality.  I’m primarily interested in researching issues in Economics of Education in general with applications for higher education and the teaching of economics.

• Research Statement and Agenda

Working Papers

• “Estimating the Impact of Relative Expected Grade on Student Evaluations of Teachers” [JOB MARKET PAPER] show abstract ▼
  Grade inflation over the past few decades has been a concern for many universities. Course evaluation scores are known to be positively correlated with students’ expected grades, and this paper tests whether or not there is an incentive for the instructor to “buy” higher evaluation scores by inflating grades. To test this hypothesis, I use unique data from the University of Washington’s Office of Educational Assessment that includes a measure of each student’s relative expected grade in the course. I find that there is an incentive to inflate grades even after accounting for the potential endogeneity of the relative expected grade variable due to unobserved teacher productivity and after accounting for the unobserved heterogeneity of instructors and departments by using a fixed effects estimation. In my estimations, department and instructor fixed effects account for a significant part of the measured effect of relative expected grade on evaluations, and by not including them, the resulting estimated impact of relative expected grade on evaluations is biased upwards. This suggests that adjustments to evaluations for possible grade inflation need to be done on a departmental and instructor basis, and not by a university-wide average.
• “Learning, Grades, and Student Evaluations of Teaching in an Economics Course Sequence” (with Levis Kochin)

Works in Progress

• “Returns to Graduate Schooling with Endogenous Enrollment Choice”
• “Optional SAT Admissions Practices and Choice of Major”
• “NCAA Division III Athletes and Career Choice” (with Erin Vernon)
• “An Economically Efficient Icebreaker”