Michael Wenz

Term Time Employment and the Academic Performance of Undergraduates

This article outlines a framework for evaluating the decision of undergraduate students to engage in term-time employment as a method of financing higher education. We then examine the impact of work on academic achievement and find that employment has modest negative effects on student grades, with a grade point average (GPA) falling by 0.007 points per work hour. We use a unique custom dataset based on students at a traditional regional state university that provides information on student motivations and allows us to directly address some of the endogeneity problems that affect existing literature. We find that students who work for primarily financial reasons earn lower grades than students who work for career-specific skills but higher grades than those students motivated by a desire for general work experience.

The Wine Trials 2010

Economists sometimes categorize goods as search goods, of which you can ascertain their quality before you purchase them; experience goods, which you can only ascertain the quality after purchasing them; or credence goods, which you can’t ascertain the quality even after consuming them (see Nelson, 1970, for the seminal work on this topic). Abstract art falls into the latter category for me; wine may fall into that category for some. For most, however, wine falls somewhere in between a search and an experience good. Consumers can fairly easily learn many characteristics about a wine before they purchase it, including the varietal, the vintage, and the vintner, but some characteristics can only be learned through a more involved search and some elements of a wine can only be evaluated by drinking it. With more information garnered through search or experience, consumers can make better choices. At its core The Wine Trials 2010 by Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch is a very useful source of one more piece of information for the consumer’s arsenal. Their book is organized into two sections, with the practical contribution coming in the second section. There the authors provide detailed information on 150 wines that performed exceptionally well on blind taste tests and sell for less than

Status Quo Bias and Two Point Conversions in Football

15. To select these wines, the authors organized tastings involving more than 6000 glasses of wine and over 500 tasters, including wines with all sorts of price points. The wines that were recognized in their book out-performed wines that were many times more expensive. Each wine is given a one-page review, with recommended food pairings and tasting notes on the wine’s nose and mouth characteristics that draw heavily on the comments of the tasters. Curiously, the writers devote a part of each page toward critiquing the wine’s label and packaging design. Some wines are highlighted as especially outstanding for value and/or quality. The 2005 LAN Crianza, a Spanish wine priced at

Matching estimation, casino gambling and the quality of life

12 was recognized as the outstanding wine reviewed for the book. As a buying guide, the book is very easy to use. But before getting to the ratings, Goldstein and Herschkowitsch devote the first section of the book to laying out the case for blind tasting as a way to choose wines for purchase. The authors focus their attention on the interaction of wine ratings, marketing and price in the market for wine. They review the academic literature, including some of their own writings, and observe that there is a positive correlation between expert wine ratings and price, but a negative correlation between the results of blind taste tests by non-experts and price. They suggest that when ordinary consumers use the prices or expert ratings of a wine as a guide to its quality, we wind up paying more for something we actually enjoy less. Journal of Wine Research, 2011, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 265–269

The impact of casino gambling on housing markets: a hedonic approach.

We derive a sequential game model for the optimal use of the two point conversion in late game situations in NFL and NCAA Division I-A football that allows for team heterogeneity. We show that teams who are more successful running the football are also more successful converting two point attempts. This leads to team-specific differences in optimal strategy choices. We find that these differences do not influence actual in-game decisions; rather, coaches are almost universally guided by “the chart,” a heuristic developed for teams with average conversion probabilities. This is consistent with a status-quo bias, where coaches are less willing to deviate from the conventional approach, even when it is optimal to do so. We also find that there are significant gains to be made by following a different approach.