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As a first-generation college student, Jay Walker, Ph.D., thought he wanted to be a banker. 

“When I learned more about being a researcher, I thought it would be nice not to have to wear a suit,” he said. 

Now in his eighth year in the Department of Economics at Old ��ֱ���� University, Dr. Walker is still studying the way people and organizations make decisions about resources and risk. But the microeconomist, who has a bit of a philosophical bent, has focused more on the challenges and opportunities individuals face in the pursuit of happiness — or at least the pursuit of maximizing satisfaction with their lives. 

“One of my philosophy professors once made an argument that you can't make an irrational decision,” Dr. Walker said. “You may misjudge the cost and benefits of your decision, but by definition, if you choose to do something, you think that is the best thing for you.”  

He’s been particularly fascinated, though, with the external factors that limit or expand the options available to an individual — especially in the last few years, as his focus has shifted to the hidden impact of a child’s age when they start school relative to others in their class.  

“Seeing an effect years down the road from something decided so randomly, that was the part that drew me in,” Dr. Walker said. “Maybe I'm the only one, maybe this is part of being an academic and being a nerd. But I was really intrigued by that idea.” 

Here, Dr. Walker shares more about his background, how children’s age relative to the other students in their class affects their lives by the time they reach college and what he’ll turn his attention to next.   

What made you decide to join Old ��ֱ���� University and when did you start?  

I came to ODU in the fall of 2017. This is my second university after completion of my Ph.D. I was at a smaller school in upstate New York, Niagara University, and as an Arkansas native, I was starting to question whether I was really prepared for another 20 years of western New York winters.   

I did a nationwide search for a new role, and I really liked everything I learned about the department here at ODU. The coastal Virginia climate didn’t hurt, either.  

How would you describe your field and its impact on the world?  

Economists assume that we live in a world of scarcity. This is sometimes called “zero sum,” the fact that there are only so many resources available. So to me, ��ֱ����s is the study of constraint maximization — making the best choices we can make for ourselves given uncertainty and limited resources.  

As a microeconomist, I am more concerned about individual well-being and why people make the choices they make. I think that's what we should be concerned about as individuals, the way our own decisions can optimize our satisfaction with our lives. My focus is labor and education — education focuses on the formation of human capital and human capital development arguably determines wages in the long run.  

Why did you choose to study ��ֱ����s?  

I have to explain this in ��ֱ���� terms. It comes back to constraint maximization. I was a first-generation college student. My grandfather, my father and an uncle were all plumbers. Probably at this point, if I was a plumber, I’d maybe make more money than what I’m making — but income isn’t the only factor to consider. There’s also time and satisfaction in life. We’ve got a certain lifespan and there’s uncertainty as to when exactly it ends. So we make decisions to maximize expected well-being.  

Choosing more years of school means I thought the cost in terms of time, effort and money to get the degree was less than the increased income or happiness I would get from the work I could do as a result of that degree. Working the type of job you might anticipate with a college education might buy you a differential in income, but it also buys you different conditions. For me, I like teaching classes and working on research. I’m maximizing my own well-being by choosing something that makes me happier with how I spend my time.  

What research have you been working on recently?  

I’ve had four or five projects about school starting age, or relative age within cohort, all using the same data. It’s basically looking at how even if all children start school during roughly the same year of life, there can still be big differences between the kids who had their birthday near the beginning of that year, and the ones who hit that milestone later.  

So you could tell a story where students who missed the cutoff and thus were older within their cohort start off with an advantage, perhaps not due to genetics, but perhaps just because they're more developed. These students might receive more attention because they're more advanced, they get put in different classes, and so the differences could grow.  

But there's a trade-off. People who are younger within their cohort potentially gain up to 364 days, or almost a full year of additional time in the labor market. People who are older within the cohort might have some advantages that are significant, but it’s not like people who are younger are guaranteed to fail. They still finish younger, and they could get up to an additional statistical year of working.  

What else have you learned about relative school age within a cohort?  

There were three core studies I worked on, all looking at college students: one on drinking behaviors, one on objective measures of success like course failures and one on students’ subjective perceptions of how much skill they gained. The paper that's still my favorite was one that came out in 2023 about how the relative point when you turn 21 in college — which is something generally determined in kindergarten, when you’re five — would affect risky drinking behaviors.   

There’s research that talks about drinking behaviors that spike when you turn 21 and stay elevated for about six months, such as an increased likelihood of accidents and citations for driving under the influence. So our question was, would turning 21 earlier or later make a difference in drinking behaviors? 

Instead, we saw the opposite. The maturity effect — being one of the oldest in the cohort, possibly not just in college but throughout all the years leading up to that point — mattered more than the access effect. Being older within the cohort seemed to be related to less drinking.   

We also looked at collegiate outcomes in terms of college course success or failure versus individuals’ perceptions of the skills they gained. There was a survey that asked students, “What did you gain during university?” Based on relative age, students who were older felt they had gained fewer skills, which fits the idea that they may have been more advanced along the way through elementary and secondary school.  

What’s next for you and how is your research evolving?  

In some ways it’s evolving with the field. Economics has been venturing into more and more interdisciplinary approaches, like the ��ֱ����s of politics, which is based on public choice.  

In the past five to 10 years, with economists who have joined the field more recently, there is a lot of talk about causal inference. There’s a push to bring more rigor to how results are shown, not just to discuss plain correlations or straightforward linear models, but ways of trying to estimate results that are arguably more causal. That’s important, that word, “arguably.” If you're ever around a bunch of economists, no one would say “This is causal, x caused y.” We’d say it’s arguably causal.  

That’s important for a project I’m working on, looking at whether celebrity deaths by suicide are contagious. There’s a common belief this is true, but I don't know that, given data quality, it's been shown fully.   

In the past couple of years, I built a relationship with a school in Mexico. I found this data that has every death recorded in Mexico from around 2005 to 2023. It’s the “universe” of deaths. Normally you only get a sample. So my hope is that this universe of deaths, this data, might give us enough to arguably causally show that yes, suicides are contagious.  

There’s one other interesting opportunity I see with this data right off the bat, and this is where it became clear to me how important it is to work with someone from Mexico who has the cultural understanding. I learned that the kindergarten cutoff in Mexico has consistently been January 1 for decades throughout the entire country. And as far as my coauthor in Mexico tells me, people can’t “redshirt,” meaning they can’t choose to wait. So I’m going to bring together these two lines of research, my research into the effect of fame on certain kinds of deaths and the effect of relative age within cohort, and I’m going to try to use that to see if there are differences in life expectancy based on school starting age. It’s a really exciting time for me, because I think that there’s potential for me to spend 10 to 15 years with this data set, and this could be a defining feature of my post-tenure research agenda.