By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer

When the term “economics” is in the news, it’s usually followed by talks of inflation, employment or interest rates. But in the Baylor economics department’s “No Free Lunch” lecture series on Wednesday, it showed students and faculty the far-reaching, often surprising applications of the subject.

When a professor gives a lecture about matching kidney donors with the right patient, one might expect it to be held in the BSB. Similarly, for a lecture on racial bias among jurors, one might look to Sid Richardson for the statistics department. One wouldn’t, however, assume that this research came out of the same department –– and one certainly wouldn’t expect it to come out of the same building that’s home to Rising Roll and endless rows of Patagonia vests.

But it did. Mark Hoekstra and Clayton Featherstone are both professors in the economics department, which at Baylor, is housed in the Hankamer School of Business. Hoekstra presented his progress on a study of racial bias in grand juries in Texas.

Contrary to the name, which is inspired by the famous economic principle, “No Free Lunch” attendees dined on sandwiches as Hoekstra shared his research. The project used advanced discrimination tests to see if grand juries discriminate based on race. In simple terms, Hoekstra and his collaborators Suhyeon Oh and Meradee Tangvatcharapong tried to determine if jurors were more harsh when they thought the defendant was Black. Jurors in a grand jury do not see the defendants, so they often infer the defendant’s race based on their name.

Featherstone presented his research on kidney donors in a fall 2023 “No Free Lunch” event. Featherstone worked alongside institutions that help match kidney transplant patients with the appropriate donors. He made an appearance at this year’s event.

While the topics made for interesting discussions between students and faculty, it almost seems that the subject of economics has left behind its roots in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.” And if you think of economics as just a way to measure the American financial system, it has.

“An old-timey answer to ‘What is economics?’ is that it’s just understanding how people in institutions deal with scarcity,” Featherstone said.

But we have moved past that.

“I don’t think that’s wrong, but more and more, [economics] is being tied together by a sort of toolkit,” Featherstone said. “One of the toolkits is going through and doing careful regression work with data. And the paper that I did with kidneys does a little bit of that.”

Hoekstra, the racial bias researcher, echoed that.

“Economists have a set of tools and a way of thinking about problems that give us an advantage in trying to answer a lot of these questions well,” Hoekstra said. “The economics toolkit is a useful toolkit for assessing a lot of questions, including some of those that one might not think of as fundamental economics questions.”

Using and advancing the “toolkit,” as well as tweaking the original “dealing with scarcity” definition of economics is the reason that the field has become so broad –– and the reason papers on trade and taxation have turned into ones on trials and transplants.

“The other part of it is always assuming that people are constrained optimizers of some sort,” Featherstone said. “They have an objective, they have some constraints, and they’re doing their best to maximize that objective subject to the constraints. And then it’s a matter of figuring out what the objective is and what the constraints are. So in that sense, why is economics so broad? Because it sets a pretty broad foundation.”

But the “No Free Lunch” series is not just meant to tout the diversity of economics. There is also a way for students to hear about research in an approachable manner and a way for professors to practice sharing and defending their research.

One challenge with these lectures, Featherstone said, is that you have to explain the “bare bones” of your research.

“[Sharing to students] forces you to not speak in jargon,” Featherstone said.

Students are not the only ones in the room, however. While simplifying their complex research for college kids, professors also must deal with equally complex questions and comments from their colleagues. Though the questions can be hard to answer, especially when trying to simplify reasoning, it’s for the good of the research.

“As a general rule, having more people think about something is better than relying on how one person thought about something,” Hoekstra said.