Bhavneet Walia

Differences in Student Evaluations of Principles and Non-Principles Economics Courses and the Allocation of Faculty Across These Courses

We analyze 19 semesters of student evaluations at Kansas State University. Faculty fixed effects are sizable and indicate that, as assessed by students, the best principles teachers also tend to be the best non-principles teachers. OLS estimates are biased because principles teachers are drawn from the top of the distribution and because unmeasured faculty characteristics are correlated with such variables as the response rate and student effort. Student ratings are lowest for new faculty but stabilize quickly. Expected GPA of the class is not an important determinant of student ratings, but equitable grading is; and the rewards for equitable grading appear larger for principles classes. The lower ratings in principles classes are fully accounted for by greater class size.

A Natural Experiment to Determine the Crowd Effect Upon Home Court Advantage

Spectator effects represent a central concept in (behavioral) sports economics. A thorough understanding of the phenomenon promises to further our understanding as to the nature of performance production under pressure. In traditional home advantage studies, it is difficult to isolate the net crowd effect upon relative team performance. In a typical sports setting, multiple factors change at once for a visiting team. Experimental evidence suggests that supportive crowds may hinder task performance. In that it serves as home stadium to two National Basketball Association teams, the Staples Center in Los Angeles offers a rare natural experiment through which to isolate the crowd effect upon competitive output. Each team possesses equivalent familiarity with built environment, and teams face similarly sparse travel demands prior to games between one another. However, the team designated as “home team” in a contest enjoys a largely sympathetic crowd due primarily to season ticket sales. Moreover, crowd effects are sizable in motivating a home team win, raising the likelihood of such an event by between an estimated 21 and 22.8 percentage points. The point estimate implies that essentially the entire home advantage between the two teams is attributable to the crowd effect.

Curbing food waste: A review of recent policy and action in the USA

The present study reviews previous published estimates as to the scale of food waste in the USA and its ecological toll (e.g., in terms of methane emissions and water usage to support the production of wasted food). The review further discusses recent public policy and private action designed to curb food waste or to apply wasted food toward hunger alleviation, biofuel production and soil nourishment. We further consider and expand upon previous estimates comparing the scale of food waste to the present scale of the US hunger problem. These estimates suggest that the recovery and redirection of an additional 15% of the present stock of edible food waste would meet 35% of the caloric needs of all Americans living in a food insecure household or very low food security household. Then, a modest to moderate proportional increase in edible food waste recovery could greatly reduce the US hunger problem in its present state. We estimate that the successful redirection of 15% of presently-wasted (edible) food in the USA would be sufficient to fully sustain 18.45 million individuals. Given available data, we cannot precisely assess the nutritional characteristics of this potential stock of food. The present study emphasizes the traditional and future importance of integrated public policy and private action at the municipal level, as food waste is typically disposed of or recovered at this level.

Instructor-Examiners, External-Examiners, and Student Learning Under the Shadow of Examination: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Two Educational Institutions

The present study takes examinations as a mechanism by which to elicit student learning and compares student learning effort provision under alternative methods of examination content generation. A two-stage game is constructed in which the examiner sets the predictability of exam content in the first stage (via content clue provision) and students exert learning efforts under the shadow of examination in the second stage. In equilibrium, an instructor-examiner is found to set content to be more predictable than that of an examination written independently of specific lecture material, review material, and past years’ examinations. This result is consistent with surveyed instructor reports of “teaching to the (instructor-generated) test,” “spoon-feeding” information to students, reviewing to the test, and re-testing students. Moreover, an instructor-examiner is found to provision more content clues as the marginal cost of student learning effort in a given class rises. In turn, student learning effort provision strictly decreases in examination content predictability. As such, instructor-generated examinations are found to cause student learning detriments and compound “naturally-occurring” inequalities in learning effort provision (learning outcome) as compared to an examination that is independently-generated. Parameterizations of the model suggest that these effects lead to potentially large proportional decreases in learning (increases in learning effort variability) across class. We discuss a solution to these unintended consequences of instructor-generated examinations. External-examiners, as used in the British educational system since the 19th century, can create independence between instruction and examination to improve learning effort provision (decrease inequality of learning effort provision).

Voting and Abstaining in the U.S. Senate: Mr. Downs Goes to Washington

Rothenberg and Sanders (2000a) find little support for a Downsian theory of voter participation in the (104th) U.S. House of Representatives. Vote abstentions are common in legislative bodies. In the 2nd session of the 110th United States Senate, for example, the abstention rate was approximately 0.057. The present paper uses logistic regression models with fixed effects as well as random effects in an alternative legislative setting to determine whether vote participation in the 110th Senate conforms to “Downsian rationality.” Throughout the analysis, we find substantial evidence that legislators in the 2nd session of the 110th Senate made vote participation decisions in a manner consistent with Downsian rationality.