Distinguished Research Professor Tim Sass has joined the Department of Economics as the first of three new faculty members hired by the Andrew Young School to fulfill its GSU Second Century Initiative: a research group that will advance “Excellence in Evidence-based Policy and Performance Management.” An expert in educational policy and program evaluation, Sass comes to the AYS from Florida State University, where he was the Charles and Joan Haworth Professor of Labor Economics.
“I’m very excited to be joining the Economics Department at Georgia State. The department’s emphasis on policy-relevant research and outstanding faculty in applied fields were major attractions to me,” says Sass. “Being positioned within one of the country’s top policy schools, I look forward to collaborating with colleagues in both economics and other disciplines.”
Sass’s research interests include the economics of education, applied microeconomics, industrial organization and public choice. Principal investigator for the study, “Charter Schools and Student Achievement in Florida,” funded by the Spencer Foundation, he has served as co-PI on two U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences-funded projects to examine the determinants of teacher effectiveness and the effects of teacher preparation and professional development on the quality of special education teachers.
A senior researcher at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, Sass has also served as co-PI on a grant project to evaluate the certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Sass is starting three new grant projects at Georgia State. One, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, will examine the effects of policies designed to recruit and retain teachers in “hard-to-staff” subjects, like math, science and special education. Another project, funded by the Smith-Richardson Foundation, will investigate the impact of eliminating tenure for K-12 teachers. The third new project, funded by the Gates Foundation and by the Smith-Richardson Foundation, will study the effects of K-12 educational policies on long-run outcomes for students, including college attendance and completion, wages and employment.
Sass has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals including Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Labor Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics. He has also made numerous contributions to books and monographs.
A former consultant to the RAND Corporation and the National Academies on various education policy issues, Sass has also served as an advisor to the public school systems of New York City, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington and an A.B. in Economics from the University of California-Davis.