Jadrian Wooten

Bazinganomics: Economics of The Big Bang Theory

Bazinganomics.com is designed to provide instructors with clips, explanations, and lesson plans related to economics concepts from TV’s 2nd most-watched broadcast show of the 2014-2015 season, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. The site contains approximately 100 clips. As the show continues to air (currently signed through the 2016-2017 season) the authors plan to increase the number of clips and lesson plans.

Rivalries in US Professional Soccer

This paper investigates factors that contribute to attendance in Major League Soccer, with a primary focus on the effect of rivalry matches. Using ordinary least squares, Tobit, and Prais-Winsten regressions, a panel of 1,191 matches found significant effects for a variety of match determinants, but relatively little support for the effect of rivalries. Fans and leagues appear to place a high value on scheduling rivalry matches, however it appears unlikely that these matches actually have a consistently statistical impact on match-day attendance. The relative insignificance of rivalry matches remains robust to the definition of rivalry as well as estimation procedure. Numerous other factors at the club and league’s discretion may provide larger impacts for leagues with a primary goal of increasing attendance.

Economics Media Library

The Economics Media Library includes a variety of television, movies, comedy specials, or news clips that can be used for teaching economics courses. The clips are sorted by topics, courses, or sources and can be searched by tags, categories or search feature.

Create random assignments: A cloud-based tool to help implement alternative teaching materials

Research has shown that learning is enhanced by variety (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000; Halpern and Hakel 2003) such as popular press books, podcasts and videos. However, these mediums do not contain question banks and further, while learning management systems (LMS) can be used to generate random quizzes, they are not designed for long-form open-ended responses thatmight be answered over the course of a few days to weeks; open-ended questions are often ideal in upper-level undergraduate andMBA courses where there are less definitive correct answers. We solve these problems by developing software to generate assignments with randomized open-ended questions. “Create RandomAssignments” is a free programdeveloped by the authors that runswithin theGoogle Drive environment. Using a Google Spreadsheet as a question bank, Create Random Assignments randomly generates an assignment for each student in the class. This assignment can be delivered in several ways: as physical printout for exams, as an emailed PDF, or as a shared Google Document. When using the latter of these features, the student completes the assignment within Google Documents and the instructor grades the assignment using Google Document’s comment feature. Because the assignment is a Google Document, the student can insert graphs (using Google’s drawing tool), equations, or any other media type. This allows for more nuanced answers and can fulfill a set of learning objectives that could not be achieved with traditional short-answer assignments. Further, it allows for multiple rounds of feedback between the instructor and student, creating additional learning opportunities. Our site features a link to Chrome App in the Google Apps Store as well as a direct link to the app for other browsers. Further, we provide software instructions and four sample question banks to test the software. An e-mail link for support is provided.

A case for complements? Location and attendance in Major League Soccer

ABSTRACT As Major League Soccer (MLS) continues to award expansion franchises throughout North America, the league must be considerate of how new clubs may impact attendance levels at nearby clubs. Regardless of whether new MLS clubs are awarded to cities with strong North American Soccer League histories, league officials must be mindful of the effect that geographically close competitors can have on attendance. Perhaps stemming from the limited number of clubs in competition, MLS teams currently appear to operate as strategic complements to one another, increasing season-long attendance as teams locate closer to one another.

Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion

As shown by Tversky and Kahneman (1991), framing an outcome as a loss causes individuals to expend extra effort to avoid that outcome. Since classroom performance is a function of student effort in search of a higher grade, we seek to use loss aversion to encourage student effort. This field experiment endows students with all of the points in the course upfront, then deducts points for every error throughout the semester. Students perform three to four percentage points better when controlling for student ability and domain knowledge. This result is significant at the 1% level in our most robust specification.

March Madness: NCAA Tournament Participation and College Alcohol Use

We examine the impact of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on college students’ drinking behavior using a nationally representative sample of American institutions. While success in intercollegiate athletics may augment the visibility of a university to prospective students and thereby benefit the school, it may also have a negative effect on the current student body by influencing risky behavior, especially the consumption of alcohol commonly associated with game day festivities. Using the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (CAS), we find that a school’s participation in the NCAA Tournament is associated with a 30% increase in binge drinking by male students at that school. The results suggest that this increase is not offset by less alcohol use before or after the tournament (intertemporal substitution) but instead seems to represent a net increase in the amount of alcohol consumed by students at participating schools.

Can Ranking Nationalities Explain the Salary Discrepancies in Major League Soccer

Previous work on soccer wages finds that some European leagues place higher than expected values on players from South America. The same case could be argued for Major League Soccer (MLS), which has previously expressed a desire to impress Hispanic markets through player acquisitions. Contrary to previous work, this paper focuses on the rank of a player’s nationality, rather than assuming all players from one continent represent similar backgrounds. Using data available through the MLS, MLS Player’s Union, and FIFA, linear and quantile regression techniques estimate wage premiums for a player’s nationality rank to uncover possible customer or owner discrimination. Players’ countries are ranked within each continent into either “top countries” or “bottom countries,” then compared across different specifications. Wage premiums ranged from 30% to 130% for the majority of top ranking countries within North America, Europe, and Africa, while certain South American countries earned wage discounts depending on their country’s rank.