Manu Raghav

Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm or a Lower GPA? Evidence from a Liberal Arts College

ABSTRACT Research in psychology has shown that early morning classes are not conducive to learning because of the peculiar sleep cycles of adolescents and young adults that cause them to be especially groggy in the morning. Our study examines the relationship between the times that classes are offered and the grades that students in these classes earn at a highly selective liberal arts college. Our main findings are that morning classes are harmful for student achievement. Grades are especially lower for classes that were scheduled at 8 am and 9 am. Moreover, while students of both genders are adversely affected by early morning courses, the effects are particularly pronounced for male students. This institution assigns students randomly to different sections of the same course, thus creating a quasi-natural experiment and enabling us to control for unobserved characteristics of students. In addition, we include student and faculty fixed effects.

A student's dilemma: is there a trade-off between a higher salary or higher GPA

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore whether there is a relationship between average grades earned in a course and the national average salaries of graduates of the major associated with the course. Using student-level data from a selective private liberal arts college, we find an inverse relationship. The result suggests that students face a trade-off between grades earned in college versus higher expected earnings in the future. This relationship is stronger for students with lower math SAT scores but not for those with lower verbal SAT scores. Finally, the female advantage in course grades diminishes significantly in majors with higher salaries.

Understanding and Teaching Unequal Probability of Selection

This paper focuses on econometrics pedagogy. It demonstrates the importance of including probability weights in regression analysis using data from surveys that do not use simple random samples (SRS). We use concrete, numerical examples and simulation to show how to effectively teach this difficult material to a student audience. We relax the assumption of simple random sampling and show how unequal probability of selection can lead to biased, inconsistent OLS slope estimates. We then explain and apply probability weighted least squares, showing how weighting the observations by the reciprocal of the probability of inclusion in the sample improves performance. The exposition is non-mathematical and relies heavily on intuitive, visual displays to make the content accessible to students. This paper will enable professors to incorporate unequal probability of selection into their courses and allow students to use best practice techniques in analyzing data from complex surveys. The primary delivery vehicle is Microsoft Excel®. Two user-defined array functions, SAMPLE and LINESTW, are included in a prepared Excel workbook. We replicate all results in Stata® and offer a file for easy analysis. Documented code in Excel and Stata allows users to see each step in the sampling and probability weighted least squares algorithms.

Why Do Budgets Received by State Prosecutors Vary Across Districts in the United States

This paper analyzes how the budget allocated to state prosecutors varies from one district to another and the reasons for such variation by using theoretical and empirical methods. The main results of this paper are as follows: Other factors being equal, more politically conservative prosecutorial districts get less budget, this decrease in budget with political conservatism is steeper in more affluent and also in more populous districts, and that there are fixed costs in operating a prosecutor’s office. Other less surprising results are that other factors remaining same, prosecutorial budget increases with the population, the crime rate, and with the affluence of the district.