Join Ford School students on Wednesday, April 24, 2019 from 3:45-5:30 pm for their final Applied Policy Seminar student flash presentations in the Betty Ford Classroom (1110 Weill Hall).
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
David Atkin, MIT on A New Engel on the Gains from Trade. Measuring the gains from trade and their distribution is challenging. Recent empirical contributions have addressed this challenge by drawing on rich and newly available sources of microdata to measure changes in household nominal incomes and price indices. While such data have become available for some components of household welfare, and for some locations and periods, they are typically not available for the entire consumption basket. In this paper, we propose and implement an alternative approach that uses rich, but widely available, expenditure survey microdata to estimate theory-consistent changes in income-group specific price indices and welfare. Our approach builds on existing work that uses linear Engel curves and changes in expenditure on income-elastic goods to infer unobserved real incomes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that while based on non-homothetic preferences, the price indices it recovers are homothetic and hence are neither theory consistent nor suitable for distributional analysis when relative prices are changing. To make progress, we show that we can recover changes in income-specific price indices and welfare from horizontal shifts in Engel curves if preferences are quasi-separable (Gorman, 1970; 1976) and we focus on what we term “relative Engel curves”. Our approach is flexible enough to allow for the highly non-linear Engel curves we document in the data, and for non-parametric estimation at each point of the income distribution. We first implement this approach to estimate changes in cost of living and household welfare using Indian microdata. We then revisit the impacts of India’s trade reforms across regions.
Donors have long engaged the private sector by tying foreign aid, forcing recipients to buy from donor countries. But recently, donors have partnered with private money on a larger scale, making tied aid an important area of interest.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
Ford Security Seminar will host William G. Rich to discuss about how the changing economic trends and politics of the GCC are Affecting U.S. Security Interests.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
A presentation by Carrie Xu, PhD student in Economics and Information on peer effects in a field experiment followed by a presentation by Ben Alcott, PhD student in Education, on whether progress assessments hinder equitable progress
Nathan Boll is the Space Policy Research Assistant in the Division of Resources, Science and Industry (RSI) of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. He is also the Graduate Fellow in International Science and Technology Policy at the Space Policy Institute. Previously, Nathan served as a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies, working on the Space Studies Board. He received a MS in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a certificate in Science, Technology and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, and is currently working on a MS in International Science and Technology Policy at the George Washington University.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
Sarah Cohodes will present work with Elizabeth Setren and Chris Walters titled "Can Successful Schools Replicate? Scaling Up Boston’s Charter School Sector."AbstractIn a climate of school turnarounds, charter school conversions, and new school openings, an important question is whether schools that boost student outcomes can reproduce their success at new campuses. We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replicate charter schools generate large achievement gains on par with those produced by their parent campuses. The average effectiveness of Boston’s charter middle school sector increased after the reform despite a doubling of charter market share.
Katie Reeves is the Engagement and Communications Lead for the US Global Change Research Program's National Coordination Office. She is in charge of developing a strategy for the program's engagement with both Federal partners and non-Federal stakeholder communities (e.g., academia, practitioners, professional organizations, community leaders, interested public). She is also the liaison to the Social Sciences Coordinating Committee, working to better integrate social sciences into Federal global change research. Finally, she oversees more traditional communications work including maintaining a web presence and product development/roll-out. She holds a BA, MPP, and STPP certificate from the University of Michigan.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
