Every year, the Ray C. Battalio Award is granted to an outstanding doctoral student in behavioral economics. The award provides them with funding to support the costs of conducting experimental research. We are very pleased to announce that the 2018-2019 Ray C. Battalo Fellow is Mofioluwasademi (Moffi) Odunowo.
Moffii is a fourth-year doctoral student in behavioral economics. Her research project is a field experiment titled, “Gender, information and education outcomes: Experimental evidence from Nigeria,” and focuses on the decision made by high school students about which academic track or curriculum to choose. This choice is made at the start of the tenth grade, and once made, it is very costly to reverse. Current evidence shows that children are misinformed or lack the necessary information to make such decisions, and this misinformation may affect the trajectory of their human capital accumulation. The aim of her project is to understand how children make these track decisions by conducting a randomized controlled trial experiment that provides students with information on the consequences of their decisions and its impact on academic outcomes. To better understand the success or failure of these interventions, she further assesses what information children value and by how much by using lab-in-the-field experiments to elicit their willingness to pay for different types of information. Her study also examines students’ beliefs about the consequences of their decisions, and measures standard economic preferences (risk tolerance and patience), in order to test how those are related to the choices made by boys and girls.
We look forward to seeing the research that will be conducted as a result of this fellowship.
Congratulations, Moffii!