In the Fall 2019 semester I launched a new undergraduate course titled Global Development & Giving (PUP 4931), which was supported by FSU’s Council of Research and Creativity. I have been visiting poor countries, predominantly in South East Asia, once or twice annually since 2014. These countries include Cambodia, Myanmar, Tibet (China), and, foremost, Laos….
Category: Education
Telemedicine Saved My Life
This piece first appeared in the Orlando Sentinel. Tragically, COVID-19 has already claimed the lives of over 2,000 Floridians. The virus is contagious and deadly, especially to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. But for me, the pandemic and the rules created to stop its spread created an odd confluence of events that likely…
Ph.D. Spotlight: Experiments in Bureaucracy, Insurance, and Monetary Economics
Dr. Daniel Neal’s dissertation consists of a set of economic experiments in bureaucracy, insurance, and monetary economics. While they are eclectic in their subject matter, they all rely on the same basic foundation: good experimental methodology. In today’s world of economics, research can usually be divided into one of two categories; theory-based or empirical. Theory…
Suffering in Silence: How COVID-19 School Closures Inhibit the Reporting of Child Maltreatment
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has generated immediate challenges for policymakers across multiple areas including health, fiscal, environmental, and education policy. To contribute to ongoing policy discussions, recent academic work has sought to understand the impact of COVID-19 policy responses on outcomes ranging from job losses to mortality to pollution. In a recent paper, we…
PhD. Spotlight: Distance Education and Horizontal Stratification in U.S. Higher Education.
Distance education has become an increasingly common mode of instruction in U.S. higher education, and today more than a quarter of students are enrolled in distance courses or programs that are fully online. Dr. Kaley Boggs’s dissertation asks two fundamental questions related to the growing presence of distance-based instruction in U.S. higher education. First, does…
Aging Today: Why are older adults especially vulnerable to financial exploitation and how common is it?
The audio from these scripts originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. An early sign of cognitive impairment is difficulty managing money, making older people susceptible to scams or to financial abuse by family or friends. But even without cognitive impairment, the ability to judge trustworthiness can decline in later life, making older adults prey to false…
The Covid-19 Pandemic Shows the Power and Limits of American Federalism.
This post first appeared on The LSE US Centre’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy American federalism allows different responses to policy challenges, and the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is no exception. When looking at any sort of crisis, the chief executive of a state or municipality is often the leader in…
George Floyd and the Future of Police Misconduct
This piece first appeared in The Beacon. The death of George Floyd at the hands of a cop with a history of excessive force complaints has spurred protests, demonstrations, and riots across the nation. Unfortunately, the violence some protesters have unleashed on these cities is likely to exacerbate existing cultural and political schisms, making meaningful…
Queen and Slim’s Cynicism Should Prompt Serious Discourse on Race and Criminal Justice
This post first appeared on the Independent Institute. When Queen and Slim went into wide release in November 2019, trailers suggested the movie was a story of a “black Bonnie and Clyde.” It’s not. That’s also the point. The movie, directed by Melina Matsoukas and written by Lena Waithe, is a disturbing commentary on racial injustice in America. Most white…
Aging Today: What is Lifelong Learning?
The script for this piece originally aired during WFSU’s Aging Today segment. We tend to think of education as something we do early in life to prepare us for employment, but programs to give educational opportunities to older adults, often referred to as lifelong learning, have a different goal. Rather than taking courses to gain employment credentials,…
