Kristin Stowe

An Examination of Learning Preferences of U.S. and International Students

Learning styles and preferences are often discussed topics in educational psychology, but are less prevalent in business education. International students are another understudied segment of business education. This article reviews literature regarding learning styles and preferences and examines whether U.S. and international students have different learning preferences using the visual-aural-read/write-kinesthetic (VARK) model. The findings indicate a large percentage of both populations have multimodal learning preferences. For the students who have one preferred learning mode, differences do exist between international and U.S. students.

Race and Local Knowledge: New Evidence from the Southern Homestead Act

The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was a large-scale effort by Congress to make land ownership accessible for recently freed slaves by opening 46 million acres of public land exclusively for homesteading. Using new micro-data from Louisiana, we examine the factors that led to successful homesteading. We compare homesteaders to the agricultural population, finding few differences other than wealth. A disproportionate percentage of homesteaders were white. We substantiate some of the claims put forth in the earlier literature, such as large amounts of fraud. Further, we present a more nuanced interpretation of a greater success rate for African-Americans. Being local or non-local had no meaningful impact on white success rates but had a large impact on African-Americans. Local African-Americans were more likely to obtain title to their land while non-local African-Americans were less likely to succeed. We hypothesize that regional knowledge, kinship networks, and white resistance to non-local African-Americans are possible explanations for this racial difference.

The stock price effect of the introduction of exchange-traded credit derivatives

This research investigates the stock market reaction to the February 2011 announcement of a new financial product: credit event binary options (CEBOs). The CEBOs could be an alternative to credit default swaps for hedging or speculating on default. These credit options, traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), pay-off only in the event of default by the underlying firm. Options were initially introduced for 10 firms from various sectors of the economy. In April 2011, additional CEBOs were introduced for five large banks. This study finds that the announcement of the binary options did not have a significant negative effect on the stock prices of the underlying firms. These firms did have a significant negative cumulative abnormal return over the entire event window surrounding option announcement. Analysis of trading volume finds that the majority of the CEBOs did not trade at all during the first 110 days after listing. Results indicate that market participants are not utilizing exchange-traded credit options for hedging credit exposure or speculating on credit default.

Unnatural experiments: the case of television game shows

Economists often use television game shows as ‘natural experiments’ to test theories on risk aversion. This article demonstrates that some of these natural experiments may not be so natural after all. Using data from Jeopardy!, we show that contestants are chosen to maintain a gender balance, with the result that men outperform women across several dimensions. This selection bias suggests that caution should be exercised in generalizing findings based on these shows to the population as a whole.