Browsing by Author "Feld, Jan"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Open Access
Are professors worth it? The value-added and costs of tutorial instructors
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2018) Feld, Jan; Salamanca, Nicolás; Zölitz, Ulf
A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions— small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students’ current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students’ course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching.
Open Access
Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2017) Feld, Jan; Sauermann, Jan; De Grip, Andries
The Dunning–Kruger effect states that low performers vastly overestimate their performance while high performers more accurately assess their performance. Researchers usually interpret this empirical pattern as evidence that the low skilled are vastly overconfident while the high skilled are more accurate in assessing their skill. However, measurement error alone can lead to a negative relationship between performance and overestimation, even if skill and overconfidence are unrelated. To clarify the role of measurement error, we restate the Dunning–Kruger effect in terms of skill and overconfidence. We show that we can correct for bias caused by measurement error with an instrumental variable approach that uses a second performance as instrument. We then estimate the Dunning–Kruger effect in the context of the exam grade predictions of economics students, using their grade point average as an instrument for their exam grade. Our results show that the unskilled are more overconfident than the skilled. However, as we predict in our methodological discussion, this relationship is significantly weaker than ordinary least squares estimates suggest.
Restricted
QUAN201: Econometrics: Introduction to Econometrics
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2024) Feld, Jan
Open Access
The Save More Tomorrow™ plan can boost retirement savings in New Zealand
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2019) Feld, Jan; Noy, Shakked
Save More Tomorrow is a retirement savings plan developed by Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi that incorporates insights from Behavioural Economics. In this paper, we describe how the plan works and discuss how it can be used to increase retirement savings in New Zealand.
Open Access
A short note on discrimination and favoritism in the labor market
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2016) Salamanca, Nicolas; Feld, Jan
We extend Becker’s model of discrimination by allowing firms to have discriminatory and favoring preferences simultaneously. We draw the two-preference parallel for the marginal firm, illustrate the implications for wage differentials, and consider the implied long-run equilibrium. In the short-run, wage differentials depend on relative preferences. However, in the long-run, market forces drive out discriminatory but not favoring firms.
Open Access
Students are Almost as Effective as Professors in University Teaching
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2019) Feld, Jan; Salamanca, Nicolas; Zolitz, Ulf
In a previous paper, we have shown that academic rank is largely unrelated to tutorial teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we further explore the effectiveness of the lowest-ranked instructors: students. We confirm that students are almost as effective as senior instructors, and we produce results informative on the effects of expanding the use of student instructors. We conclude that hiring moderately more student instructors would not harm students, but exclusively using them will likely negatively affect student utcomes. Given how inexpensive student instructors are, however, such a policy might still be worth it.
Open Access
Understanding Peer Effects: On the Nature, Estimation and Channels of Peer Effects
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2015) Feld, Jan; Zölitz, Ulf
This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students’ course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven by improved group interaction rather than adjustments in teachers’ behavior or students’effort. We further show, building on Angrist (2014), that classical measurement error in a setting where group assignment is systematic can lead to substantial overestimation of peer effects. With random assignment, as is the case in our setting, estimates are only attenuated.