Results for “cohort” 216 found
Emergent Ventures grant recipients, the first cohort
Here is the first round of winners of the new Emergent Ventures initiative at Mercatus, led by me. The list is ordered roughly in the order grants were made, and reflects no other prioritization. All project descriptions are mine alone and should not be considered literal attributions of intent to the project applicants. Here goes:
Anonymous grant for writing in Eastern Europe.
Pledged grant to San Francisco’s Topos House, conditional on finding a “social science prodigy” to live in the house for a while and interact with the other Topos fellows. Topos is a San Francisco house where several tech prodigies live and periodically seminars and larger group interactions are held there or connected to the house.
Travel grant made to 18-year-old economics prodigy, to travel to San Francisco to meet with members of the “rationality community.” The hope is to boost her career trajectory.
Grant to support the work of Mark Lutter and his Center for Innovative Governance Research, on charter cities and also an attempt to create a new charter city.
Grant to Harshita Arora to help her pursue work in brain science, including brain-computer interfaces to help disabled people manipulate and move objects. Harshita is a 17-year-old Indian prodigy, who first received attention for her programming work in the app space. Harshita made her bio and proposal public: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j5Zf2RIiKVUUZzJb6qGQdx2WmG7q4NS9/view
Leonard Bogdonoff has a project to scrape Instagram and create a searchable concordance of street art around the world. His website is here and his blog is medium.com/@rememberlenny. One use of this project is to amplify the voice of “protest art” against the constraints of censorship from autocratic governments, but it is also a new way to glean usable information from Instagram.
Travel and conference grant to Juan Pablo Villarino, from Argentina, sometimes called “the world’s greatest hitchhiker.”
Ben Southwood, public intellectual from England, support for his writing and research on why progress in science has slowed down.
Eric Lofgren has worked at the Pentagon for seven years and now will spend a year at Mercatus/George Mason to develop the skills, including blogging and podcasting, to become the nation’s leading public intellectual on defense procurement.
A two-year pledge to Gaurav Venkataraman, at University College of London, to support his doctoral work on the idea of RNA-based memory. This research also has exciting implications for the design of artificial intelligence.
Joy Buchanan, economist, a grant to conduct research on why people become entrepreneurs and initiate start-ups, using the methods of experimental economics.
Michael Sonnenschein, Masters student at MIT in development economics (and a television screenwriter) a grant for research to reform and improve the Haitian lottery system, and turn it into a means to combat poverty.
Stefan Roots is writing and editing an on-line and also paper newspaper to cover local news in Chester, Pennsylvania, aimed at the African-American community.
Jeffrey Clemens, professor at UC San Diego, a grant to help him develop his on-line writing in economics.
Kelly Smith has a project to further extend and organize a parent-run charter school system in Arizona, Prenda, using Uber-like coordinating apps and “minimalist” educational methods.
David Perell, to encourage and support his work in podcasting and social media.
We are in the midst of processing several other awards as well, so do not worry if you are not yet mentioned.
I am delighted to welcome this very prestigious and accomplished “entering class” of Emergent Ventures fellows. If you are considering applying, please note that we are interested in other topics and methods as well.
Are generational or cohort-level changes strong?
Here is the view of Kali H. Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donnellan, in their piece “Rethinking “Generation Me”: A Study of Cohort Effects from 1976-2006”:
Social commentators have argued that changes over the last decades have coalesced to create a relatively unique generation of young people. However, using large samples of U.S. high-school seniors from 1976 to 2006 (Total N = 477,380), we found little evidence of meaningful change in egotism, self-enhancement, individualism, self-esteem, locus of control, hopelessness, happiness, life satisfaction, loneliness, antisocial behavior, time spent working or watching television, political activity, the importance of religion, and the importance of social status over the last 30 years. Today’s youth are less fearful of social problems than previous generations and they are also more cynical and less trusting. In addition, today’s youth have higher educational expectations than previous generations. However, an inspection of effect sizes provided little evidence for strong or widespread cohort-linked changes.
The pointer is from @hardsci. As he (Sanjay) notes on Twitter: “Researchers these days just don’t make cohort arguments like they used to” And here are some related results on narcissism.
Cohorts born in the late 1930s and 40s did especially well
Via @ClaudiaSahm, there is a new paper (pdf) from Emmons and Noeth at the St. Louis Fed, the abstract is here:
The global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession reduced the income and wealth of many families, but older families generally fared better than young and middle-aged families. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances reveals that being young was a significant risk factor during the downturn, regardless of a family’s race, ethnicity, or education level. Among older families, those headed by someone 70 or over fared slightly better than those headed by someone between 62 and 69. Income and wealth also increased most strongly among older families during the two decades preceding the crisis. Part of the explanation for favorable income and wealth trends among currently living older Americans is a positive birth-year cohort effect. After controlling for a host of factors related to income and wealth, we find that cohorts born in the late 1930s and 1940s have experienced more favorable income and wealth trajectories over their life courses than earlier- or later-born cohorts. While it is too soon to know how cohorts born in recent decades will fare over their lifetimes, it appears that the median Baby Boomer (born in the 1950s and early 1960s) and median member of Generation X (born in the late 1960s and 1970s) are on track for lower income and wealth in older age than those born in the 1930s and 1940s, holding constant many factors other than when a person was born.
One driving force seems to be that the older generation was simply more motivated to save. And here is a dramatic sentence:
Among young and middle-aged families, the median levels of net worth were 30.5 percent and 24.1 percent lower in 2010 than in 1989, respectively.
The paper presents many interesting facts, but I would start with pp.9-10.
From The Guardian, here is an argument that middle class youth in Great Britain today will end up faring worse than did their parents.
Further data on alcohol use amongst American youth
This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent alcohol control policies on later-life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information on state and year of birth to identify individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence and tracks the evolving impacts into middle age. We find that ZT Laws led to significant improvements in later-life health. Individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence were substantially less likely to suffer from cognitive and physical limitations in their 40s. The health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes. These patterns cannot be attributed to changes in educational attainment or marriage. Instead, we find that affected cohorts were significantly less likely to drink heavily by middle age, suggesting an important role for adolescent initiation and habit-formation in affecting long-term substance use.
Here is the article by Tatiana Abboud, Andriana Bellou, and Joshua Lewis, via tekl once again. People, you can make things easier for the political philosophers — why should they have to weigh liberty against utility? Just give up drinking voluntarily.
Conditional Approval for Human Drugs
Recently a new drug to extend lifespan was granted conditional approval by the FDA–the first drug ever formally approved to extend lifespan! (By the way, the entrepreneur behind this breakthrough, Celine Halioua, is an emergent ventures winner for her earlier work rapidly expanding COVID testing. Tyler knows how to spot Talent!)
Great news, right? Yes, but there are two catches. First catch: the drug is for extending the lifespan of dogs. Second catch: Conditional approval is only available for animal drugs. Conditional approval was permitted for animal drugs beginning in 2004 for minor uses and/or minor species (fish, ferrets etc.) and then expanded in 2018 to include major uses in major species. What does conditional approval allow?
Conditional Approval (CA) allows potential applicants (referred to from this point as “sponsors”) to make a new animal drug product commercially available after demonstrating the drug is safe and properly manufactured in accordance with the FDA approval standards for safety and manufacturing, but before they have demonstrated substantial evidence of effectiveness (SEE) of the conditionally approved product. Under conditional approval, the sponsor needs to demonstrate reasonable expectation of effectiveness (RXE). A drug sponsor can then market a conditionally approved product for up to five years, through annual renewals, while collecting substantial evidence of effectiveness data required to support an approval.
Here is where it gets even more interesting. Why does the FDA say that conditional approval is a good idea?
First, it’s very expensive for a drug company to develop a drug and get it approved by FDA. Second, the market for a MUMS [Minor Use, Minor Species, AT] drug is too small to generate an adequate financial return for the company. The combination of the expensive drug approval process and the small market often makes drug companies hesitant to spend a lot of resources to develop MUMS drugs when there is so little return on their investment.
By allowing a drug company to legally market a MUMS drug early (before it is fully approved), conditional approval makes the drug available sooner to be used in animals that may benefit from it. This early marketing also helps the company recoup some of the investment costs while completing the full approval.
…Similar to conditional approval for MUMS drugs, the goal of expanded conditional approval is to encourage drug companies to develop drugs for major species for serious or life-threatening conditions and to fill treatment gaps where no therapies currently exist or the available therapies are inadequate.
Sound familiar? These are exactly some of the points that I have been raising about the FDA approval process for years. In particular, by bringing forward marketing approval by up to 5 years, conditional approval makes it profitable to research and develop many more new drugs.
Conditional approval is very similar to Bart Madden’s excellent idea of a Free to Choose Medicine track, with the exception that Madden makes the creation of a public tradeoff evaluation drug database (TEDD) a condition of moving to the FTCM track. Thus, FTCM combines conditional approval with the requirement to collect and make public real-world prescribing information over time.
But why is conditional approval available only for animal drugs? Conditional approval is good for animals. People are animals. Therefore, conditional approval is good for people. QED.
Ok, perhaps it’s not that simple. One might argue that allowing animals to use drugs for which there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness but not yet substantial evidence of effectiveness is a good idea but this is just too risky to allow for humans. But that cuts both ways. We care more about humans and so don’t want to impose risks on them that we are willing to impose on animals but for the same reasons we care more about improving the health of humans and should be willing to risk more to save them (Entering a burning building to save a child is heroic; for a ferret, it’s foolish.)
I think that the FDA’s excellent arguments for conditional approval apply to human drugs as well as to (other) animal drugs and even more so when we recognize that human beings have rights and interests in making their own choices. The Promising Pathways Act would create something like conditional approval (the act calls it provisional approval) for drugs treating human diseases that are life-threatening so there is some hope that conditional approval for human drugs becomes a reality.
Dare I say it, but could the FDA be lumbering in the right direction?
Boosting fertility by subsidizing child-bearing for *young* women
From Vidya Mahambare:
Several countries have grappled with a longstanding dilemma – how to reverse the trend of falling fertility rates. In 2019, eighty-one countries had fertility rates below the population replacement threshold. The replacement fertility rate, estimated at 2.1 births per woman, represents the level required to sustain a stable population over the long run, assuming mortality and migration remain constant.
Is it now time, at least in some countries, to implement policies targeted at lowering the age at which women have their first child?
Perhaps, yes. Here is why.
While most countries in Europe, Northern America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China have had low fertility rate for years, India, the most populous country, joined them in 2021. Countries such as Greece, Italy, Japan, and Spain have had very low fertility levels below 1.5 births per woman for decades. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate, with 0.8 births per woman.
Countries have tried several policies to raise the fertility rates, with only sporadic and local success. A commonly adopted measure is maternity leave, paid or unpaid, with job security. Other policies include subsidised childcare, child or family allowances, paid or unpaid paternity leave, flexible or part-time work hours for parents, and tax credits for dependent children.
These measures are appropriate, but miss one point.
The age at which a mother gives birth to her first child can impact her likelihood of having a second child. In several developed countries, the mean age of mothers at the birth of their first child has surpassed or is close to 30 years. Since 2000, many countries have seen the mean age at first birth increase by at least two years. Even in China, reports indicate that the age at which new mothers give birth to their first child now exceeds 30 years in Shanghai.
Until 2010, the largest number of new births in developed countries occurred among mothers aged 25 to 29. Presently, the highest number of first-time mothers falls within the 30-34 age group. Women can and do have successful deliveries in their late thirties and early forties. For many, it is a deliberate decision to start a family late.
The point however, is this – even if a woman desires to reconsider her choice of having a single child, there is less time and inclination to reverse the course if the first childbirth occurs after the mother reaches the age of 30.
Studies often report decreased happiness and life satisfaction during the early stages of parenthood, and younger parents may be unhappier. This is not the same as saying children don’t make parents happy. Parenthood by itself can have a substantial positive effect on life satisfaction but time and monetary cost offsets it. That is why the negative association between fertility and happiness is weaker in countries with higher public support for families.
As parents gain experience and adjust to the demands of parenthood, they may become more adept at managing stress and finding joy in parenthood. They may begin to recognise that loosening the intensive parenting norm relieves stress and raises happiness. Also, recently a study shows that the reported results about the trade-off between happiness and children require strong assumptions about how individuals report happiness and their beliefs about its distribution in society.
Rising female education and employment, women’s delayed entry into the labour market, high monetary and time cost of raising kids, and rising real estate prices have all played a role in declining fertility. In societies where marriage is culturally deemed essential for starting a family, the rising age at marriage and a declining marriage rate also contribute to a postponement in having the first child. For example, In South Korea, a country where only 2% of childbirth is outside marriage, the marriage rate has slid to a record low.
Countries need to contemplate whether they should promote more women having their first child in their twenties. Historically, several countries have had official policies to raise women’s age at marriage and the age at their first child. Is it time to shift gears?
Should countries that aim to boost fertility consider offering increased financial incentives or tax concessions for specific age brackets? Is it time for countries, including Canada and the United States of America, which currently have below-replacement level fertility and lack official policies to influence fertility levels, to initiate strategies aimed at reducing the average age of women with their first child?
Further, several countries facing fertility crises continue to subsidise family planning services directly through public programs or indirectly through non-governmental organisations. Indeed, the option for family planning should be accessible to all adults, but is there a necessity to offer public support for it in countries facing below-replacement-level fertility rates?
A word of caution. The above suggestions do not apply to all countries with fertility rates below the replacement level. An example is India, where the mother’s mean age at first birth is still less than 22 years, with the median age at first marriage less than 20 years in 2019-21 for women in 25-29 age cohort.
What may go wrong with a policy that aims to lower women’s age at first child? Could it be that women would still prefer to have only one child but at a younger age? Yes, that is possible, but that’s no different from today and, hence, not a worse outcome. Would women end up compromising their education and employment? Not really, if we are targeting the whole age group of twenties. Can couples afford to have children 2-3 years earlier than now? That’s tough to answer, but it may be feasible with childcare subsidies and workplace support.
To be clear, child support should be available for women of all ages. Exploring increased incremental support tailored to specific age groups might be worthwhile in a race to raise fertility rates.
Those who graduate from college late in life
It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction – around 20% – of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the implications of this phenomenon. First, we show that these so-called late bloomers have significantly contributed to the narrowing of gender and racial gaps in the college share, despite the general widening of the racial gap. Second, late bloomers are responsible for more than half of the increase in the aggregate college share from 1960 onwards. Finally, we show that the returns to having a college degree vary depending on the age at graduation. Ignoring the existence of late bloomers therefore leads to a significant underestimation of the returns to college education for those finishing college in their early 20s.
That is from a new NBER paper by Zsófia L. Bárány, Moshe Buchinsky, and Pauline Corblet.
Income security for American workers has been rising
American workers are doing relatively well, but there is still a lot of anxiety about their plight. To many commentators, the US worker is suffering: Whether the culprit is outsourcing, trade with China, or the sheer daily turbulence of capitalism, that worker faces increasingly volatile income prospects. One political scientist even wrote a whole book about this worry.
Fortunately, the reality is much brighter. One study of this question, performed by a group of economists from Wharton, Stanford, the University of Minnesota and Brookings, suggests that income volatility has mostly been declining for the last seven decades — and especially for the last four. Whatever volatility risks remain, they used to be much worse.
One striking feature of these results, posted last week and based on data from the US Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration, is how widespread are the gains in job security. They are not going to just a scant few workers. They are long-running for both women (dating to the 1950s) and men (dating to the 1980s). They hold across most demographic groups and by gender, age, earnings level and cohort.
Here is the rest of my latest Bloomberg column.
Excess All-Cause Mortality in China After Ending the Zero COVID Policy
In this cohort study across all regions in mainland China, an estimated 1.87 million excess deaths occurred among individuals 30 years and older during the first 2 months after the end of China’s zero COVID policy. Excess deaths predominantly occurred among older individuals and were observed across all provinces in mainland China, with the exception of Tibet.
So what is the proper sarcastic headline here? “I guess that flu was worse than we thought!”? Or “How is it that China ran out of ivermectin?” Here is the new JAMA piece, via Rich Dewey.
To be clear, I never thought Zero Covid was a sustainable policy for China. The real criminal negligence lies with CCP leadership, which turned down opportunities to pursue joint mRNA vaccine production — with the West of course — earlier on.
Thursday assorted links
1. McCartney and Starr will re-record “Let It Be,” along with Peter Frampton, Mick Fleetwood, and Dolly Parton. Can we have Carnival of Light now, please?
2. Ecuador is deteriorating (NYT).
4. Massive influx of Chinese into ride-hailing jobs.
5. The story of Ozempic (NYT).
6. A directory of Date Me docs. What are the meta-lessons from these?
The Rise in American Pain
A significant literature has documented trend increases in pain among Americans over the last two or three decades. There is no single explanation seeming to work well for the increase. We show that, rather than resulting from a smooth upward trend, the increase was almost entirely concentrated in the 2007-2010 period, the time of the Great Recession, a result not uncovered in prior work. The disproportionate increase in pain among the less educated is also shown to have occurred primarily at the time of the Recession, with either little or no trend before or after. The Recession jump occurred only at older ages and, by cohort, primarily only at the ages when they experienced the Recession. However, the jump is difficult to explain, for while there was a temporary decline in employment during the Recession, it is unclear why there it should be followed by a permanent increase in pain. We assess a number of explanations related to family structure, the deterioration of family life, hysteresis, and biopsychosocial channels. While some factors have potential explanatory power, the rise in pain continues to be mysterious and deserves further research in light of our new findings.
Very important in my view. That is from a new NBER working paper by Sneha Lamba and Robert A. Moffitt.
More on Singapore and public sector talent development
From an anonymous correspondent, I will not indent:
“As a Singaporean, I appreciated your recent post on Singapore and the self-perpetuating nature of its establishment. I wanted to raise three points that may be of interest to you, which seem to also be under-discussed outside of Singapore.
The first is the Singaporean system of scholarships. You write in the post that “In Singapore, civil service jobs are extremely important. They are well paid and attract a very high quality of elite, and they are a major means of networking…” This is partly true, but the salary of civil servants at the entry level and most middle management positions is generally lower (by a small by noticeable amount) than that of comparative private sector employment, for the level of education etc. The real tool by which the government secures manpower for the civil service is a system of government scholarships. Singapore provides scholarships to high-school-equivalent students to fund their university education (either in Singapore or overseas), in exchange for which the student is bonded to work for the government for a period of 4 – 6 years after graduation. For talented low-income students, this is naturally an appealing option, and is win-win from the government’s point of view. What Singapore has successfully done, however, is create a set of social norms in which taking such a scholarship is seen as prestigious, and not something merely done out of need, such that many middle-class or even quite wealthy students take up the scholarship despite not needing it to fund their education. The incentive for them is the fast-tracking of scholars (relative to those employed through normal means) into higher positions within the civil service, a practice which is essentially an open secret. You could also think of this as a modern re-creation of the Chinese imperial exam system, without the bad parts, and I do think the cultural connection is not unimportant.
Singapore is often seen as a model for other developing countries for any number of the policies it adopts. But I think one truly underrated high impact policy is this scholarship system. It largely solves the problem governments in many countries face of keeping talent in the public sector, while redressing some degree of inequality (of course, the scale is limited). To a government, the cost of funding the higher education of a couple hundred students a year (Singapore’s birth cohort is small, after all) is relatively insignificant, even at the most expensive American colleges. I’ve always thought of this policy as one of the single lowest-cost, highest-impact things that other developing countries can borrow from Singapore: a marginal revolution, if you like.
The second point is on how the civil service is enmeshed with the elected government. The PAP often draws its candidates from the civil service, and because of its electoral dominance, it largely has the power to decide on the career pathways of its MPs and ministers. Unlike the UK, therefore, where ministerial promotions are largely dependent on political opportunity, the PAP does do quite a bit of planning about who its ministerial team a few years down the line is going to consist of, and often draws civil servants to fit into that system. If we look at the current Cabinet, for example:
- Lawrence Wong (deputy PM and heir presumptive)
- Heng Swee Keat (deputy PM)
- Ong Ye Kung (Minister for Health)
- Desmond Lee (Minister for National Development; probably closest to the US Department of the Interior in its scope)
- Josephine Teo (Minister for Communications and Information)
- S. Iswaran (previously Minster for Transport, though now under investigation for corruption)
- Chee Hong Tat (acting Minister for Transport)
- Gan Kim Yong (Minister for Trade and Industry)
[They] were all ex-civil servants before standing for election, and many more backbenchers and junior MPs could be added to that list. This contributes significantly to the links between the PAP and the establishment structure as a whole, because it means that MPs when coming into power have often been steeped in “the system” for many years before formally standing for election, and the process of selecting and promoting MPs is much more controlled than the relatively freer systems in liberal democracies.
The last point is about the army. It is not uncommon for ex-soldiers to serve in government in other countries, the US being a prime example, but while in the US this is largely a random process of ex-soldiers themselves choosing to run, in Singapore it’s a much more deliberate effort. First, the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) awards scholarships too, in a manner similar to the general civil service. In a classically Singaporean way, the scholarships are aggressively tiered, ranging from the most prestigious SAF Scholarship (only around 5 of which are awarded each year) to the SAF Academic Award which funds only local university studies. The degree of scholarship one receives in the army thus determines one’s career progression. The Chiefs of Defence Force (in charge of the SAF as a whole) have all been SAF scholarship recipients, as have almost all of the Chiefs of Army, Navy & Air Force. The relevance of this to your post is the fact that recipients of the more prestigious scholarships are often then cycled out of the army into either the civil service or politics. In Cabinet:
- Chan Chun Sing (Minister for Education)
- Teo Chee Hean (Coordinating Minister for National Security)
- Lee Hsien Loong (PM)
[They] all started their careers in the SAF, and this list could likewise be extended by considering junior MPs. Likewise, many of the heads of the civil service in the various ministries are ex-SAF soldiers, as are the heads of many government agencies like the Public Utilities Board (managing water and electricity) and Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes the establishment newspapers.
Taken together, these three features are I think what contribute to the sense of the “establishment” being a kind of self-contained system that you allude to in your post. In general, young people are attracted to either the civil service or military after leaving high school, and are bonded to the government in exchange for university funding. Although some leave after the bond period, many stay on due to the promise of career progression in both organisations. Eventually, some then become cycled out into the elected government, and the process repeats. This process has, I think, become very attractive to the government because it allows them to exert much more control over the selecting and nurturing of talent, than the more freewheeling British or American systems.”
TC again: Bravo!
Progress
Mass incarceration fundamentally altered the life course for a generation of American men, but sustained declines in imprisonment in recent years raise questions about how incarceration is shaping current generations. This study makes three primary contributions to a fuller understanding of the contemporary landscape of incarceration in the United States. First, we assess the scope of decarceration. Between 1999 and 2019, the Black male incarceration rate dropped by 44%, and notable declines in Black male imprisonment were evident in all 50 states. Second, our life table analysis demonstrates marked declines in the lifetime risks of incarceration. For Black men, the lifetime risk of incarceration declined by nearly half from 1999 to 2019. We estimate that less than 1 in 5 Black men born in 2001 will be imprisoned, compared with 1 in 3 for the 1981 birth cohort. Third, decarceration has shifted the institutional experiences of young adulthood. In 2009, young Black men were much more likely to experience imprisonment than college graduation. Ten years later, this trend had reversed, with Black men more likely to graduate college than go to prison. Our results suggest that prison has played a smaller role in the institutional landscape for the most recent generation compared with the generation exposed to the peak of mass incarceration.
Here is the full article, via a loyal MR reader. The causes of this advance should be a greater topic of discussion.
On white flight (from the comments)
Are whites fleeing from Asian-heavy California public schools? One recent paper suggested maybe so, but abc raises some doubts:
I don’t want to dismiss the paper out of hand, as I have seen time and again the challenges communities face both in and outside of the school setting in accommodating demographic change.
However, I don’t think the headline result in this paper is particularly credible. First, there isn’t a well-articulated research question to guide the choice of regression. Second, the authors implicitly rely on the “an instrument is always better” fallacy rather than explaining why their instrument yields more reliable estimates than naive OLS for the (unstated) question of interest. Taken together, the paper is undergrad-thesis level material elevated only by a click bait topic and result. If we want to make bold claims about White animosity towards Asians (a claim that also constructive of such animosity and counter-animosity from Asians towards Whites) we should demand substantive evidence. This paper does not present such evidence.
Some key takeaways:
(1) The authors note that a mechanical housing market replacement would suggest a one-for-one effect, but say that their -1.47 effect is above that threshold. However, if we check the confidence interval using a conservative 1.96 critical value and the estimated standard error of the coefficient estimate, we have -1.47 + 1.96*0.268 = -0.96 so that we are not statistically significantly different from -1 by this measure.
(2) The naive OLS estimate in high-SES regions is -0.6, well below the fixed enrollment effect of -1. The authors speculate that OLS may be biased downward because the error term include unmeasured district quality changes that draw in both Asians and Whites. (Note such a correlation only operates if enrollment is not capped, so inconsistent with that model.) The authors don’t document any of these omitted variable issues, however, and just assert that their instrument will be better.
(3) Authors do not substantively engage issues with their IV. First, the IV doesn’t account for changes in composition of immigrants over time (increasing wealth and education of Asian arrivals relative to earlier waves) nor does it account for movement of second-generation Asian families. If there is no omitted variable bias but the instrumented entry is lower than the actual entry, then mechanically the coefficient will have to be higher to offset this effect and restore least-squares minimization.
(4) The instrumented Asian inflows coefficient could pick up effects from Asian-agglomeration effects. A one unit increase in Asian enrollment from pure fixed-pattern immigration flows made lead to shifts of previously settled Asians or shift the direction of subsequent immigration. For example, a settled Korean in Riverside who sees large increases in Korean population in Orange County may see OC as being more attractive than before and move into the area. This induced shift may be only partially captured by the first-stage prediction, leaving the 2nd stage coefficient of interest to increase in magnitude.
(5) Various sensitivities lead to surprising results. First, the instrument behaves poorly in some subsamples, e.g. the bottom-half of the SES scale. Why should we believe an instrument in one data subset when it plainly fails in the complement? Second, the instrument is insignificant in the Bottom Tercile of the above-median SES group (appendix table 2). Third, the IV estimate is only -0.841 in the top tercile of the above-median SES group, again below the key -1 threshold if enrollment caps are binding. Taken together, are we to think that we can identify white flight using this instrument only for the 66.6th to 83.3th percentile bucket?
(6) There’s just a big background trend issue that one has to worry about here. The theory of white flight begs the question of “flight to where?” However if we just look at Appendix Figure 2 during this time period there is a big drop in total White enrollment (and a small decline in Black enrollment) while Asian and Hispanic enrollment see big increases. To what extent are we just finding that aging out of whites in high-SES regions is being replaced disproportionately by Asians?
(7) A couple other wrinkles: how are mixed-race students handled? how would demographic shifts in total enrollment by district affect the 1-to-1 threshold? If child population is shrinking over time (e.g. because families are leaving CA, children per family is declining) then normal churn would predict more than 1-to-1 replacement of new-cohort race versus previous-cohort race.
So perhaps the right answer is “no”?
Thursday assorted links
1. Education vs. cohort control.
2. Economics of generic medicines.
3. Cecilia Rouse is the new president of Brookings.
4. Oregon school performance is cratering.
5. The oldest known customer complaint?
6. How much does IQ explain why liberals are overrepresented in sociology?
7. Not my view, sad! I would opt for Aztec UFOs, with amates.
8. This link includes a Patrick Collison and Lant Pritchett dialogue.