Dr. Chad Turner
Assistant Professor of Economics
Dr. Chad Turner remembers his days of searching for the perfect university to attend. His first year of high school, he received a Spelman College sweatshirt, a neat item to add to his attire since his middle name is Spelman. Beaming with pride, he wore the sweatshirt to school one day and could not figure out why a fellow student walked past him laughing and saying “you’ll fit right in.”
Turner was aware that he is a distant relative of John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, who was an early financial supporter and the namesake of Spelman College in Atlanta. What he didn’t know was that Spelman is a historically black college for women, with a 99 percent female enrollment.
Turner didn’t enroll at Spelman but definitely enjoyed his college experience at Northwestern University in Chicago.
“I was raised on a tight leash, and then was let loose in the big city,” Turner says. “I was one of those students who, in retrospect, clearly overdid ‘college freedom’ at the expense of the more formal aspects of a college education. I was reasonably proud that I was able to reel it in and still have an academic accomplishment or two to be proud of at the end.”
Turner says he didn’t have enough fun as an undergraduate, so he went to graduate school. When he finished graduate school, the only way for him to continue being in college was to take a job teaching at one.
“It is fun to hang around with college kids and be on campus,” Turner says. “But the best part of teaching has always been the satisfaction I get when a light bulb goes on, or when a student comes back and tells you that what they learned in class was truly useful in the real world.”
Turner says economists do a “lousy” job of promoting how interesting economics can be. He combines his love of sports with his economic studies through several projects. For example, Turner is currently researching the productivity and pay structure of NBA players and the effectiveness of drug testing in sports. Turner has also studied the educational attainment level of the average worker in each state since 1840 and its effects on the economic prosperity of the states.
In his spare time, Turner enjoys watching baseball and college football, running, golfing, practicing his game theory at Harrah’s Casino and making his own beer.
To learn more about Turner’s take on a wide range of subjects, visit the blog that he created along with Dr. Morris Coats, Dr. Gokhan Karahan and Dr. Norbert Michel: http://www.nicholls.edu/bastiatsbastions.
Education:
B.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., Clemson University
Courses taught:
ECON 211 – Principles of Microeconomics
ECON 311 – Markets, Prices and Firms
ECON 325 – Labor Economics
Contact information:
102C White Hall
Phone: 985.448.4194
E-mail: chad.turner@nicholls.edu