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Parag Pathak: Winner of the 2018 Clark Medal
Full text linkThe American Economic Association awarded Parag Pathak the 2018 John Bates Clark Medal for his research on the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research take the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result, Parag’s research led directly to educational reforms in many large US cities and abroad. The leading example is Parag (and co-authors’) research on school assignment mechanisms that led many school districts to institute fairer and more efficient procedures for allocating students to schools. The institutional detail Parag learned in working on the assignment problem led to innovative empirical work on the impacts of different types of schools, most notably of charters, which was suggestive of the characteristics of both successful schools and of the types of students who gained from being enrolled in them. Using the data generated by the new assignment rules, his recent work provides complete frameworks for the quantitative analysis of the benefits of different assignment mechanisms and has measured those benefits in New York high schools
Essays in the economics of education
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak)"--Page 3.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis consists of three chapters that study how characteristics of peers and schools affect human capital. The first chapter reports estimates of academic and social peer effects from a large-scale field experiment at selective boarding schools in Peru. The experimental design overcomes some methodological challenges in the peer effects literature. I randomly varied the characteristics of neighbors in dormitories with two treatments: (a) less or more sociable peers (identified by their position in the school's friendship network before the intervention) and (b) lower- or higher-achieving peers (identified by admission test scores). While more sociable peers enhance the formation of social skills, higher-achieving peers do not improve academic achievement; in fact, they further reduce the academic performance of lower-achieving students. These results appear to be driven by students' self-confidence.The second chapter studies whether students prefer friends who are similar to them and whether these preferences persist when students have to interact frequently. I use network surveys and exploit variation in the exact position of the students in the allocation to dormitories at selective boarding schools in Peru. Students are more likely to form social relations with peers who are of their same poverty status, academic level, and sociability. However, students who are neighbors in the allocation to dormitories are more likely to become friends, and this occurs regardless of their type. Furthermore, being exposed to peers of a different type also encourages more diverse friendships and study groups that go beyond the neighbors in the dormitories. The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak) evaluates mismatch in Chicago's selective public exam schools, which admit students using neighborhood-based diversity criteria as well as test scores.Regression discontinuity estimates for applicants favored by affirmative action indeed show no gains in reading and substantial negative effects of exam school attendance on math scores. These results hold for more selective schools and for applicants most likely to benefit from affirmative-action, a pattern suggestive of mismatch. However, exam school effects in Chicago are explained by the high quality of schools attended by applicants who are not offered an exam school seat. Specifically, mismatch arises because exam school admission diverts many applicants from high-performing Noble Network charter schools, where they would have done well.by Román Andrés Zárate.Ph. D.Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economic
Approaches to education market design
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-210).This thesis consists of essays about how to improve education markets through analyzing data generated by such markets. In chapter 1, I start with looking at how families decide which school to attend in a school choice system. Though such systems are designed assuming that families make well-informed choices upfront, I use data from NYC's high school choice system to show that families' choices change after the initial match as they learn about schools. I develop an empirical model of evolving demand for schools under learning, switching costs, and demand responses to prior assignments. The estimates suggest that there are even more changes in underlying demand, undermining the welfare performance of the initial match. To alleviate the cost of demand changes, I investigate dynamic mechanisms that best accommodate choice changes. These mechanisms improve on the existing discretionary reapplication process. In addition, the gains from the mechanisms dramatically change depending on the extent of demand-side inertia caused by switching costs. Thus, the gains from a centralized market depend not only on its design but also on demand-side frictions (such as demand changes and inertia). In chapter 2, I turn to education production after students start attending schools. In centralized school admissions systems, rationing at oversubscribed schools often involves lotteries on top of preferences of students and schools. This random assignment is extensively used by empirical researchers to identify the effect of getting in a school on outcomes such as test scores. I theoretically study whether a popular empirical research design extracts a random assignment as intended, providing a condition under which the research design successfully extracts a random assignment. Chapter 3 (with Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Josh Angrist and Parag Pathak) considers the complementary question of how best to use the lottery-generated variation for impact evaluation. We develop easily-implemented strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded. We apply these methods to find large achievement gains from charter school attendance in Denver. By analyzing test-score consequences, chapters 2 and 3 complement chapter l's analysis of welfare/happiness consequences of school attendance.by Yusuke Narita.Ph. D
Essays on the functioning of housing and labor markets
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-206).The first chapter consists of my job-market paper. The foreclosure rate of sub-prime mortgages increased markedly across 2003-2007 borrower cohorts-sub-prime mortgages originated in 2006- 2007 were roughly three times more likely to default within three years of origination than mortgages originated in 2003-2004. Many have argued that this surge in sub-prime defaults represents a deterioration in sub-prime lending standards over time. I quantify the importance of an alternative hypothesis: later cohorts defaulted at higher rates in large part because house price declines left them more likely to have negative equity. Using loan-level data, I find that changing borrower and loan characteristics explain approximately 30% of the difference in cohort default rates, with almost of all of the remaining heterogeneity across cohorts attributable to the price cycle. To account for the endogeneity of prices, I employ a nonlinear instrumental-variables approach that instruments for house price changes with long-run regional variation in house-price cyclicality. Control function results confirm that the relationship between price declines and defaults is causal and explains the majority of the disparity in cohort performance. I conclude that if 2006 borrowers had faced the same prices the average 2003 borrower did, their annual default rate would have dropped from 12% to 5.6%. The second chapter is joint with David Autor and Parag Pathak. Externalities from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods are central to the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the sudden and largely unanticipated 1995 elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had previously muted landlords' incentives to invest in their properties and altered the assignment of residents to locations. Pooling administrative data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of all Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol genrated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for an estimated 30 percent of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period. The majority of this contribution is due to induced appreciation of never-controlled properties, while residential investments can explain only a small fraction of the total. The third chapter is joint with Denis Chetverikov and Bradley Larsen. We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Standard quantile regression techniques are inconsistent in this setting, even if the treatment is exogenous. Using the Bahadur representation of quantile estimators, we derive weak conditions on the growth of the number of observations per group that are sufficient for consistency and asymptotic normality. Simulations confirm the superiority of this grouped instrumental variables quantile regression estimator to standard quantile regression. An empirical application finds that low-wage earners in the U.S. from 1990-2007 were significantly more affected by increased Chinese import competition than high-wage earners. We also illustrate the usefulness of the estimation approach with additional empirical examples from urban economics, labor, regulation, and empirical auctions. Chapter 1 Keywords: Mortgage Finance, Sub-prime Lending, Foreclosure Crisis, Negative Equity Chapter. 2 Keywords: Urban Economics, Residential Externalities, Rent Control, Price Regulations. Chapter 3 Keywords: Quantile Regression, Instrumental Variables, Panel Data, Wage Inequality, Import Competition. Chapter 1 JEL Classification: GOl, G21, R31, R38. Chapter 2 JEL Classification: D61, H23, R23, R31, R32, R38 Chapter 3 JEL. Classification: C21, C31, C33, C36, J30.by Christopher John Palmer.Ph. D
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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