THE TEACHING ECONOMIST - William A. McEachern 
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Issue 36, Spring 2009
William A. McEachern, Editor
The Grapevine
Incoming freshmen at Berea College who do not request a roommate are unconditionally and randomly assigned one. Ralph Stinebrickner of Berea College and Todd Stinebrickner of the University of Western Ontario rely on this luck of the draw to examine the effect on a student's first-semester grades of being assigned a roommate with a video game. Based on a sample of 210 students, the authors find that having a roommate who brings a video game lowers the student's grade point by an average of 0.28 (based on a 4.00 scale) if the student also brings a video game himself. This effect is statistically significant. If the student does not bring a game himself, the impact of having a roommate who brings a game is to lower the student's grade point by 0.20, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels. Students also kept diaries to track time use. The average student studied about 3.5 hours per day. Students with a video-game roommate studied an average of about 40 minutes less per day than other students. Being assigned a roommate with a video game has the same predictive power on one's first semester grade point average as scoring one standard deviation lower on the ACT. See "The Causal Effects of Studying on Academic Performance," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy , (2008, 1) pp. 1-53, which can be found at http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1868&context=bejeap .
Which institutions, worldwide, supply the most undergraduates who go on to earn economics Ph.D.s in the United States ? John Siegfried of Vanderbilt and Wendy Stock of Montana State found that between 1997 and 2002 Seoul National University topped the list with a total of 162, more than twice as many as second-placed Harvard with 74. National Taiwan University was third with 63 and University of Delhi was fourth with 54. Among U.S. undergraduate sources only, and after adjusting for the total number of undergraduate degrees granted, the top four undergraduate sources of economics Ph.D.s between 1997 and 2003 were Swarthmore, with 15 per 1000 undergraduate degrees, Agnes Scott College with 9, Grinnell College with 9, and Carleton College with 7. Their research, "The Undergraduate Origins of Ph.D. Economists" appeared in the Journal of Economic Education (Fall 2007), Vol. 38: 461-482. An earlier version can be found at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu06-w11.pdf .
If you haven't yet seen them, you should check out Hans Rosling 's videos on YouTube, where he animates cross-section data over time to tell a powerful story of economic progress (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w ). Rosling, a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute in Sweden , has developed some lively graphics to show how the poor countries of the world have been pulling themselves out of poverty. (Thanks to Mike Fladlien , economics instructor at Muscatine High School in Iowa , for bringing these animated videos to my attention.)