Riley Acton

@riacton.bsky.social

5458 Followers 1758 Following

education economist ap @bowdoincollege.bsky.social research fellow @iza.org https://www.rileyacton.com/

Irene and Alan Wurtzel Theater at Oberlin College
Banner reading “A Tribute to David Smith – Our Teacher” from Hampshire College, featuring a large tree design filled with names and text, hung on a wall beneath wooden beams.
Jocelyn Roberson from Arkansas sticks her balance beam dismount to secure the team’s trip to the national semifinals
Graphic with headline text “When Faculty Stop Showing Up” by David DeMatthews. Below, an illustration shows a blank white silhouette of a person standing between tall library bookshelves, symbolizing faculty absence or disengagement. Caption reads: “Faculty disengagement is reshaping campus life, one closed door at a time.”
Rocky Maine shoreline with tide pools and seaweed, ocean waves to the right, and distant houses under a clear blue sky.
A woman in a red jacket stands beside a large white polar bear statue on a stone base engraved “Gift of the Class of 1912, June 1937,” in front of a red brick building with white columns and an arched window.
1:00–2:30pm Friday, 20 March, 2026, Zurich B 7.12 College Choices in Broader Social, Political, and Legal Context Presentation type: Paper Panel Track: Post-secondary student access (e.g., admissions, college choice) & financial aid Chair: Bradley Curs IN THIS SESSION 249 Political Views & College Choices in a Polarized America Paola Ugalde A¹, Riley Acton², Emily Cook³ ¹ Louisiana State University. ² Miami University. ³ Texas A&M University 429 The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct Sarah R Choddes, Katherine Leu University of Michigan 27 Gun violence on college campuses and its impact on prospective students Cecilia Rodriguez Ingold University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 259 College Enrollment Patterns After SFFA v. Harvard Michael D. Bloem, Ashley Edwards, J. Parker Goyer, Jessica Howell, Xiaowen Hu, Michael D. Hurwitz, Samuel J. Imlay, Jennifer Ma, Matea Pender College Board
8:15–9:45am Friday, 20 March, 2026, Zurich B 5.12 College Expansions, Institutional Behavior, and Implications for Students and Communities Presentation type: Paper Panel Track: Post-secondary student access (e.g., admissions, college choice) & financial aid Chair: Riley Acton IN THIS SESSION 418 College Expansion and the Geography of Opportunity Victor Quispe University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 444 More than a Ranking: How University Rankings are Shaping Higher Education Steven Chaffin, Bradley Curs University of Missouri 420 Where Does the Tide Roll? The Causes and Consequences of Out-of-State Enrollment at Public Flagships Crossan Cooper, Ryan Haygood Yale University 52 Signaling Quality or Gaming the System? Evidence from College-Major Accreditation Cristhian A Molina University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Grace Howard: “Community College Finances Over The Business Cycle”
Higher Education and Political Polarization Paper Session Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EST) Philadelphia Convention Center, 204-C Hosted By: AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Chair: Joshua Goodman, Boston University
Organizer Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan Individual Presentations Politics of the Professoriate: Longitudinal Evidence From All Faculty of a State Public University System - Presenting Author: Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University Political Views & College Choices in a Polarized America - Presenting Author: Riley Kaitlin Acton, Miami University Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes - Presenting Author: Matan Kolerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Do Faculty Affect Their Students' Political Beliefs? - Presenting Author: Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan
Thursday, November 13, 2025 1:45 to 3:15pm Property: Grand Hyatt Seattle, Floor: 1st Floor/Lobby Level, Room: Leonesa 3 Aligning Dollars with Demand: Effects of Workforce-Aligned Financial Aid on Postsecondary and Labor Market Outcomes Policy Area: Education Session Submission Type: Panel Friday, November 14, 2025 10:15 to 11:45am Property: Grand Hyatt Seattle, Floor: 1st Floor/Lobby Level, Room: Leonesa 3 Consequences of State Policies on Higher Education Institutions Policy Area: Education Session Submission Type: Panel 3:30 to 5:00pm Property: Grand Hyatt Seattle, Floor: 1st Floor/Lobby Level, Room: Princess 2 Causes and Effects of Political Polarization in Higher Education Policy Area: Politics, Media, and the Policy Process Session Submission Type: Panel
Miami University’s Oxford, OH campus with a light dusting of snow
1. Go to the Kroger Community Rewards page. 2. It you have an account, log in using your information. 3. If you do not have an account, click Register Your Kroger Plus Card 4. Link your Kroger Plus Card account by visiting the Community Rewards page. 5. In the search bar, enter "CAIN" or our number: NM091. 6. Then, go shopping! 7. Make sure to re-register every year! Every time you swipe your Kroger Plus Card when making a purchase, CAIN will receive a percentage of the total—up to $50,000 per quarter! There is NO cost to you and it doesn't affect any other Kroger Rewards perks you may be enjoying.
Various pastries laid out on white parchment paper under a red neon sign that says OPEN.
Cincinnati Mayor AFTAB PUREVAL WINS. AP RACE CALL AT 8:13 P.M. ON NOV. 4, 2025. 22% of votes counted CANDIDATE VOTES PCT Aftab Pureval* NP 12,694 81.7% Cory Bowman NP 2,835 18.3% Updated Nov 4, 2025, 8:16 PM *Incumbent
ID: A graphic reads “All profits on shutdown Sundays donated to CAIN” and includes the CAIN logo, which features the words “nourishing community” and “challenging poverty” on interlocked outstretched arms.
Skeletons in a lawn dressed in colorful outfits with pride flags and a sign reading “Pink Bony Club”
Me and my former student, Brittany Lowe (now Johns Hopkins PhD student)
Downtown Lexington, KY. 10/16/25.
Pink and mauve flyer titled “Women in Economics Across the Nation.” It advertises a Zoom networking event for undergraduate economics students on Wednesday, October 29, with times listed as 5 PM PT, 6 PM MT, 7 PM CT, and 8 PM ET. The left side includes a QR code for registration. The right side describes that students can join alumni breakout rooms featuring speakers from the public sector, private sector, and graduate school, who will share career advice and experiences.
Halloween display with tombstones reading “Democracy & Civil Liberties,” “Decency,” and “Free Press,” a web-trapped Uncle Sam, and a grim reaper figure on a lawn.
Notes: This figure displays willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for a 10 percentage point increase in the share of liberal students, conservative students, or state Democratic vote share, by respondents’ political views. Estimates are shown for the full sample (circles), students aged 18–25 (triangles), and students who report being “somewhat” or “very” interested in politics (squares). Whiskers represent 95% confidence intervals based on block bootstrapped standard errors with 500 replications.
This figure plots the distribution of political views across colleges, separately in six time periods. Panel (a) shows the share of students at a college who identify as liberal or far left, while panel (b) shows the share of students who identify as conservative or far right.
Political Views and College Choices in a Polarized America Riley Acton Miami University & IZA Emily Cook Texas A&M University & CESifo Paola Ugalde A. Louisiana State University We examine the role of students’ political views in shaping college enrollment decisions in the United States. We hypothesize that students derive utility from attending institutions aligned with their political identities, which could reinforce demographic and regional disparities in educational attainment and reduce ideological diversity on campuses. Using four decades of survey data on college freshmen, we document increasing political polarization in colleges' student bodies, which is not fully explained by sorting along demographic, socioeconomic, or academic lines. To further explore these patterns, we conduct a series of survey-based choice experiments that quantify the value students place on political alignment relative to factors such as cost and proximity. We find that both liberal and conservative students prefer institutions with more like-minded peers and, especially, with fewer students from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The median student is willing to pay up to $2,617 (12.5%) more to attend a college where the share of students with opposing political views is 10 percentage points lower, suggesting that political identity plays a meaningful role in the college choice process.
Students walking between academic buildings on Miami University’s campus
Pemaquid Point, Maine
John Conzelmann presents his research on the diversification of higher education
Lexington, KY
A colorful banner on a white fence shows Jane Austen with rainbow heart sunglasses and the words “More Pride, Less Prejudice” against a rainbow background.
Cover of children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”
The nature of competition in the luxury fashion industry Ella Roberts1 Farmer School of Business, Miami University Economics Departmental Honors Thesis ABSTRACT: This paper extends the entry model of Bresnahan and Reiss (1991) to the luxury fashion industry, offering a novel empirical lens on market structure in prestige-driven retail. Using data on U.S. metropolitan areas and luxury store locations, I estimate structural parameters of latent profit expressions and the resulting population thresholds required to support varying numbers of luxury holding companies. The results reveal a “hard-easy-hard” entry pattern: the first firm faces high fixed costs and a large entry threshold; the second incurs substantially lower incremental fixed costs and requires only a modest increase in population; and the third faces a much higher threshold, reflecting intensified competition. Markets with substantial tourism face significantly lower entry thresholds. This study contributes to industrial organization by applying established IO methods to an underexplored yet economically significant sector.
Students discuss in groups next to a sign reading The Farmer School of Business
Data from the University of Toledo on the number of graduates from different academic programs in 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24. Provided by Signal Cleveland reporting. https://signalcleveland.org/university-of-toledo-axing-nine-majors-response-ohio-sb1/
Riley Acton & John Waterhouse stand in front of a screen with the title “Clocking the Contract: Union Representation and Time Use Substitutions”
Hand holding a waffle cone with white gelato scoops and a plastic spoon
Husky dog in foreground, with women’s Connecticut vs South Carolina national championship basketball game in background
Local employees work in three NIOSH divisions, George said: One provides scientific support for claims involving workers with cancer caused by radiation. One focuses on preventing occupational death, injury and disease. The third aims to prevent work-related illness. Local NIOSH employees are among 20,000 that Health and Human Services aims to remove as part of Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, according to national news reports. The agency currently employs 82,000
Graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows median wages for high school and college graduates over time. See: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:wages
Back-to-back news articles announce that the Small Business Administration plans to cut 40% of its workforce & that President Trump says student loans will be handled by the Small Business Administration
Poster displays Miami University Departmental Honors in Economics students, including headshots with names and project titles.
Crowd watches gymnastics
Biedermann said the canceled contracts would be rebid in hopes of getting the same or better work done at a lower cost. She said she did know how or why DOGE concluded that these particular contractors are overpaid or underdelivering. “The significant amount of money as compared to the outcomes generated for students is not commensurate,” she said. She said they are “looking for vendors to generate better outcomes for students.” Asked how DOGE workers have the requisite expertise to make these determinations, she said, “The entire goal of DOGE is to cut waste, and they have been trained to identify that.”
Direct costs cover the actual research itself, including salaries, travel, equipment, and supplies directly supporting the grant-supported project or activity. Direct costs that would not be incurred if the grant did not exist. Indirect costs are sometimes called overhead. They refer to the expenses associated with running the institution that is home to the funded research project, including things like equipment, utilities, building maintenance, rent, administrative officers' salaries, accounting department costs, and personnel department costs. Indirect costs are incurred independently of the funded research project, but the project depends on them to happen.
Top-funded research institutions in Ohio include: Case Western Reserve University Ohio State University Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center University of Cincinnati Children's Hospital (Columbus) University of Toledo Battelle Memorial Institute Northeast Ohio Medical University Ohio University Kent State University
Email from IZA reads: Dear Riley Acton, We are delighted to inform you that your IZA network membership status has been elevated to IZA Research Fellow. This promotion reflects our recognition of your significant contributions to the IZA network and your ongoing commitment to advancing research in the field of labor economics.