Steve Trost

Dept. of Economics

Virginia Tech

3016 Pamplin Hall

(Mail Code 0316)

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Current Research Interests

My research interests are varied and diverse.  Currently I am doing work on the effectiveness of online homework on improving exam performance.  Results suggest that while homework completion tends to improve exam performance early in the semester, this effect fades as the semester progresses.

This paper uses a large and comprehensive data set that I collected in my own courses.  The data can be useful in many ways.  One area of particular interest is how men and women perform on different topics as the course progresses.  

My dissertation studied determinants of corporate charitable giving with a special focus on the role of local community factors and managerial compensation.  Here is an abstract.   Part of my dissertation has been turned into this paper:  "Crowding Out in Corporate Charitable Giving."  

While corporate giving is my current focus, I am interested in all types of charitable giving and hope to expand the scope of my research in coming years.  I am interested to see the effect that the rise in huge donations (Gates, Buffett, et al) has on giving by the rest of us.  Such donation may crowd out lesser individual gifts.  If you are digging a hole with a spoon and someone comes along with a back-hoe, do you keep digging or stand back and let them take over?  Or, alternately, does their generosity become infectious?

I have a wide variety of interests outside of charitable giving, including topics in industrial organization, international trade and public economics.  I have recently become interested in how monetary awards impact risky behavior in sports.  I am currently gathering data from golf tournaments that I hope will allow me to create an index of risky play.  This index, when compared across tournaments and situations for the same player, can hopefully tell us something about how the potential financial gain or loss from resulting from a risky play impacts the likelihood that the risky play is chosen.  

I also would like to explore “happiness economics” more.  What things make people happy?  Do people make rational choices that really increase their happiness?  How do we even measure happiness?