Can a simple email nudge students to seek study help?

Students don't always access the help that they need. Often, it's because they don't realise what support is available to them. I'm interested in any way that we can make it easier for students to access support that enhances their learning and helps them to succeed. So, I was really interested to read this 2020 article by Rita Balaban and Patrick Conway (both University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings (ungated earlier version here).

Balaban and Conway evaluate the impact of emails (passive nudges) reminding students about two economics support programmes that were available on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. The two programmes were the 'EconAid Center', which provided walk-in peer tutoring during weekdays and early evenings, and a series of five hour-long learning strategy seminars run by the co-authors. Students were randomly assigned to one of two email groups, one of which received weekly reminders about the EconAid Center, while the other received reminders before each learning strategy seminar. The evaluation focuses on the 199 students who consented to participate.

Those emails represent a very light-touch intervention. But did they work? The nudges did get students to engage with the programmes, but only for female students and first-year students, who were more likely to engage with the EconAid Center if they received the email nudges. Female students and students of colour were actually less likely to attend the learning strategy seminars if they received the email nudges. So, at best a mixed result.

Turning to whether the two programmes worked to improve grades:

The coefficients corresponding to the effects of the support programs on performance are positive but insignificantly different from zero.

Now, the small sample of 199 students (and the much smaller samples for subgroups) may simply have been too small to estimate the effects precisely. Participation in the programmes was also relatively low. A larger study might therefore do a better job of telling us whether the programmes actually had an effect or not.

So, file this study away under possibilities for the future. Light-touch nudges may help some students take the first step towards seeking support. A natural extension today would be to test whether similar nudges can steer students towards effective human or AI-assisted study support.

Why the City Rail Link is already showing up in property prices

This past week, my ECONS102 class covered hedonic demand theory, which suggests that when you buy certain goods (like houses, cars, computers, or land), you are really buying a bundle of characteristics, and each of those characteristics individually has value. So, when you buy a house, you are really buying a bundle that includes a number of bedrooms, bathrooms, car parking, views, and access to local amenities. And when those characteristics change, then the value of the house will change.

So, it should be no surprise then that the City Rail Link (CRL) will change property prices, since access to good transport links is a valued characteristic. And buyers are taking notice. The exact opening date of the CRL has not yet been announced, although it has been expected in late August or early September. And yet, in anticipation of higher land values in the future, the demand for land around stations that will benefit from the CRL has increased now. As the National Business Review reported back in June (paywalled):

On the residential front, and after reviewing Real Estate Institute data, CBRE found that while Auckland residential prices have risen 29% since 2016, prices around station catchments – defined as a 10-minute walk (about 800 metres) to catch a train – have climbed by an average 36%.

The top-performing areas were Morningside, Kingsland and Baldwin Avenue in Mt Albert, which came in at 108%, 95% and 84% respectively, despite a similar increase in supply during that time...

If you correctly anticipated that the price of an asset would increase in the near future, and you bought it now, you would reap a 'windfall gain'. However, by buying the asset now, you are increasing demand for that asset. And if lots of others also anticipate higher future prices and decide to buy now, that increased demand (and competition for the asset) will tend to drive prices up now. That theory is consistent with the observed increase in property prices, which the CBRE report notes is concentrated around stations that will benefit from the CRL and not other suburbs.

A combination of anticipatory demand and hedonic demand has pushed up land (and house) prices. Hedonic demand explains why improved transport links are valuable, while the anticipatory demand effect explains why that value can appear before the first CRL train even runs.