Sarah’s Academics
I’m pursuing a PhD in Economics at Georgia State University. I am in my fourth year, having completed all courses and exams, and I defended my dissertation proposal in August 2008. My fields of focus are Experimental Economics and Environmental Economics, but I am also interested in development and public economics. I will be on the job market starting in fall 2009 and will defend my dissertation in spring or summer 2010.
Here is my CV.
My dissertation will be a three-essay piece. Each essay is placed in one of my main areas of interest: behavioral, development, and environmental applied microeconomics. In a sense, each examines an institution and how that institution allows people to express their true preferences or perhaps subverts that expression. The essays are:
· The Girl Scout Cookie Phenomenon: Peer Pressure in Grassroots Fundraising – this essay uses an economic experiment to examine how people influence each other in social and strategic ways in a setting where charitable contributions are being elicited. I presented this at the SEA conference in Washington, DC in November 2008.
· Reconsidering Enduring effects of the Conservation Reserve Program – this essay examines parcels that have left the CRP to determine whether they are less likely to return to farming (compared to parcels that have not been in the CRP), to see whether having been in the CRP has had enduring effects on land use.
· The Meaning in Mistakes – this essay studies the tendency for subjects in a risk experiment to make egregious mistakes (to choose a sequence of lotteries that can’t be easily justified by any theory). This tendency to err in the experiment is correlated with the subjects’ real-life use of financial instruments that relate to financial risk. A version of this essay was published in JRU April 2009 (see publications below).
In Spring 2009, I am teaching Econ 2100 (The Global Economy, undergraduate) section 005, TuTh 11am-12:15pm, and I am the Teaching Assistant for Prof Petrie’s Econ 8120 (PhD-level Optimization and Partial Equilibrium Analysis). Students in both courses should feel free to contact me with any questions (my email address is sarah (dot) jacobson (at) gmail (dot) com—obviously, turn that into a real email address). Information on both courses will be conveyed through uLearn.
My research advisor is Professor Ragan Petrie. At the moment, we’re working with data from Rwanda on risk preferences and credit usage, and data from Peru on risk and time preferences. Papers we have written in the past:
A paper I wrote with Professor James Alm (published but not peer reviewed):
Papers I’ve written for classes:
· “Do People Really Know and Use Marginal Tax Rates? An Experimental Design,” Fall 2006.
· “Child Labor and Intrahousehold Bargaining,” Fall 2005. This was submitted as fulfillment of a requirement for my MA in Economics, with Ragan Petrie as my advisor.
Here’s my Econ 9520 “Teaching Seminar” Spring 2006 website my team made up on Academic Dishonesty.