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Expected Graduation:

PhD in May 2018

About:

Aaron Phipps is a Bankard Fellow and two-year IES fellow Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Virginia entering his fifth year. He received a B.S. in Economics and Statistics with Honors from Brigham Young University in 2010. He worked in the Utah Governor’s Office of Management and Budget before entering the Ph.D. program at the University.

 

He spent several years working as a volunteer in Argentina, which influenced his decision to specialize in the economics of education to address growing education inequalities in the U.S. He now works with Sarah Turner, James Wyckoff, and William Johnson studying teacher labor markets and higher education labor market outcomes.

Fields of Interest:

Labor, Public, Applied Micro

Areas of Interest:

Economics of Education, Organizational and Personnel Economics

Current Projects:

Production Uncertainty - I am conducting a real-effort multi-tasking lab experiment that tests the predictions of my production uncertainty model. This model would explain why teacher performance incentives based on student test scores have produced mixed results. It would also suggest that incentive designs should carefully consider how well employees know the production function of the measured output, since high levels in production uncertainty can lead to perverse incentive effects.

Effects of Unannounced In-class Evaluations - Using the unique and random timing of evaluations for teachers in the Washington DC School District, I show that teachers modify their classroom activities to align with the evaluation rubric in response to the possibility of an in-class evaluation. The possibility of an evaluation improves student performance on standardized reading exams. My results also suggest that the effort function is discontinuous where the probability of an evaluation is zero, i.e. teachers with zero probability of being evaluated perform worse than teachers with a very low probability of evaluation.

Skill Composition for College Degree Fields - Using ACS data and the Onet skill requirements for jobs, I create a 2-dimensional mapping of degree fields that describe the fundamental skills developed in each major. I use this to compare closeness between majors and examine the signaling vs skill effects of different degree fields.

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