CBA Grad Student’s Research Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Kellie Lindsay, a UNO CBA student earning her master's degree in economics, had her research on the unconscious influence of beauty on perceptions of commonly sought employee traits published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

"It is quite rare for a master’s student to publish their work at all, much less in JEBO. JEBO is a A* journal on the ABDC list. (The Australian Business Deans Council's (ABDC) Journal Quality List is a journal ranking exercise undertaken by the Council that divides different business journals into four categories of quality: A*, A, B, C.) Kellie has other work in the pipeline, and she is presenting this paper as part of our speaker series and at two conferences,” said Dr. Ben Smith, Associate Professor of Economics, and Department Chair.

Many factors went into Kellie’s decision to pursue her master’s degree in economics, including CBA’s faculty, and the CAB Lab. With an undergraduate in business administration, she found that her favorite classes were always her economics classes.

“I loved the abstractness and the ability to simplify very complex problems, and one of my professors noticed that. Dr. Bun Song Lee, a past economics professor at UNO, happened to be my undergraduate advisor and one of my main economics professors. He encouraged me to apply for graduate school at UNO. Dr. Lee had many great things to say about the economics department, especially Dr. Catherine Co. It was after that that I learned about the CAB Lab in the College of Business Administration and started connecting the dots - I knew that this would be the best opportunity for me to lean into my interests in behavioral economics, which led me to apply for the graduate assistantship. I also had a desire to one day pursue a Ph.D. and knew that if I wanted it to be in economics, I needed to make myself more competitive with a master's in economics. I don't have the intense mathematics background like many economics Ph.D. applicants, so I needed a way to set myself apart,” Lindsay said.

Kellie says she is so passionate about economics because she is passionate about people. “Though I love studying economics for a wide variety of reasons, like understanding macro-economic trends and being better positioned to make tough analytical decisions, I especially love the underlying emphasis on quantifying human behavior. No matter the problem, using the tools of economics, we are solving it for people; and I am very, very passionate about people,” she said.

While at UNO, Kellie has worked at the Jack & Stephanie Koraleski Commerce and Applied Behavioral Laboratory (CAB Lab), which is a state-of-the-art research facility that enables diverse experimental research with immense practical implications. In fact, the data for this paper was collected through the CAB Lab.

“This paper would not exist without the undergraduate students who work in the CAB Lab and their contribution to the data collection process. Those students are Aiden Barger, McKenna Flynn, and Connor Jensen. They very meticulously and successfully collected data for this project, which required the deletion of only one participant's data due to low eye-tracking data quality,” Lindsay said.

Kellie plans on applying for Ph.D. programs in economics soon. She has a robust research pipeline to keep her busy for years to come. You can read this research paper or attend Kellie's research seminar on Nov. 10 at 3PM.