comment on Prestigious Law School

This Tuesday was a disaster for me, because I stayed in the classroom and listened to different things for nearly 10 HOURS! But I shouldn't complain anything, anyway it was my own choice.

At that busy and painful day, I listened to a seminar. As usual, here is related information.

Title: The Returns to Attending a Prestigious Law School

Author: Paul Oyer (Stanford University)

UPF Labor, Public, and Development Seminar

Ok, I should admit that I was too tired to follow and focus on all points of the presentation. Anyway, it was a typical empirical work from labor economists, or education. However, the paper is available online here: http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/oyer.pdf

Copy some conclusions from his paper:

  • In 2002 and 2007, those lawyers that went to top 10 law schools made, on average, 25% more than those that went to schools ranked 11-20 and over 50% more than those that went to schools ranked 21-100.
  • Graduates of Top 10 schools were also much more likely to work in large law firms in leading law markets.
  • We find that at least a third of the large returns to law school reputation are due to selection, but this selection is almost entirely on a single variable - quality of the undergraduate institution attended.
  • Our results are consistent with a reasonably large causal effect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.

For anyone interested, please download the paper and read. I was just interested in the topic, and it indicated it is true that "selection" is the main factor, which means those who attend top law schools are expected better than the rest peers. In the other word, they may be also successful even they are in other areas...

investment for marriage

Every Monday means a new week, but my intensive classes always start from Tuesday. Therefore, the best choice for Monday may be to go and listen to the seminars. This afternoon I listened to this presentation:

Marriage as a rat-race: Pre-marital investments and assortative matching
V. Bhaskar (UCL)
UPF Microeconomics Seminar

Well, I should admit his title really attracted me. Although I have somehow realized that marriage has something to do with investment, but due to my poor scope of knowledge, I know nothing about how to build an economic model and explain the investment behaviors that people take for marriage. His model is not complicated, but very persuasive. By assuming the "match" process with probabilities and noises, he explained how the equilibrium exists and what are  (Pareto) efficient conditions. Here it seems meaningless to put some math equations, and what has drawn my interests is that he considered a special case: the unbalanced population in China/parts of India. I was always wondering how people outside of China analyze China's problems or phenomenon. Today I got a part of answer. At least from the public statistics about Chinese population structure, there are about 50% more men than women, so the boys only have a chance (equals the female/male ratio)  to find his wife (the question here is that because of the "one-child policy" in China, when the first baby of a couple is a girl, they may choose to not  report the birth to the government so that they can try the second chance to see whether they can get a boy. Thus, I don't really believe the public data). And apparently, it influences their investment behaviors and the final efficient equilibrium conditions.

I am wondering what would happen if we consider the dynamic change of marriage market (if it can be regarded as a market match process). What may be taken into account is that not boys/men in China are intending to get married later and later, while girls usually get married at their early age. For example, some of my friends (girls) have a boyfriend 5 or even more years older than them. That is to say, if a boy cannot match a girl when he is young (20-25), he is still possible to find a wife when he becomes older and have more wealth in hand which may attract young girls. Although in the long run it is not a question, I still want to know whether this kind of "match" will have effects on boys' investment behaviors or not.

Similarly, in the labor market, if people feel hard to find a job now, they may go back to school and pursue higher degrees. What will happen if all people do this?  (just like what university graduates do in China now: they spend more time on get an admission from graduate schools with the expectation that they may find a better job with a master degree. However, will individual rationality result in group non-rationality?)

I'm looking for the full text of this paper but unfortunately it is not available online since it seems really new. Hope the author will post this paper on his websites soon, then I'll update the link here.

[Update Oct, 8] I have received the full text from Prof. Bhaskar. If anyone who is also interested, please leave a message below this post with your email address. When he puts it on his website, I'll update the link if possible.

Our results are consistent
with a reasonably large causal e§ect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the
premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.

Optimists and Pessimists

Today it seemed that I had nothing better to do so I picked up two guys and went to a seminar. It was about "Optimists and Pessimists", or more specifically, the title was Insurance and Perceptions: How to Screen Optimists and Pessimists, offered by Johannes Spinnewijn from London School of Economics as a series of UPF Microeconomics Seminar. Well, I should admit that he is really young (just graduated from MIT last year)...Although there is no decent published papers listed on his CV, according to today's speech, he is supposed to be a good researcher and teacher.

As the titled says, his paper is about how to distinguish two kinds of people in the insurance market: who are optimistic and who are pessimistic. He has got some interesting conclusions by separating the optimistic behaviors into two kinds: baseline-optimistic and control-optimistic. Then follows the discussions in competitive market and monopoly market respectively, there appears the different actions what the agent and principal take. I love one of his conclusion that "people with heterogeneous abilities or risks, but identical perceptions cannot be separated" while "people with different perceptions can be separated with a menu of screening contracts, even when the true abilities or risks are the same". That indicates (I hope I understand it correctly) the expectation plays a more important role than the true abilities when deciding people's behavior. Thus, whatever your true ability is, your attitude partly decides the situation you are facing/living in. At the end, he also considered the government's role and regulation/subsides, but that was not what I really cared about then.

At last, one interesting episode. Mas-colell suddenly appeared when the seminar was going. I was shocked because I've heared that Mas-colell didn't really take part in teaching or any thing else related to our program or GSE. But he appeared... It seemed that he was still caring about what the latest economic researches are doing. Great! (But anyway, during the discussion, he didn't say any words...)

(the temporary loss of my Chinese blog forces me to post in English... Is it good or bad? I have no idea... )

Forward: Statistical Software Award - 2011

Sorry, it has been really a long period of time since my last update. Forgive me but I haven't got anything new in academic so I don't want to waste your time.

Just now received an email from Yihui, and I'd like to forward and post it here. Pay attention if you are interested.

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award - 2011

Statistical Computing Section
American Statistical Association

The Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical
Association announces the competition for the John M.  Chambers
Statistical Software Award. In 1998 the Association for Computing
Machinery presented its Software System Award to John Chambers for the
design and development of S. Dr. Chambers generously donated his award
to the Statistical Computing Section to endow an annual prize for
statistical software written by an undergraduate or graduate student.
The prize carries with it a cash award of $1000, plus a substantial
allowance for travel to the annual Joint Statistical Meetings where
the award will be presented.

Teams of up to 3 people can participate in the competition, with the
cash award being split among team members. The travel allowance will
be given to just one individual in the team, who will be presented the
award at JSM.  To be eligible, the team must have designed and
implemented a piece of statistical software.  The individual within
the team indicated to receive the travel allowance must have begun the
development while a student, and must either currently be a student,
or have completed all requirements for her/his last degree after
January 1, 2009.  To apply for the award, teams must provide the
following materials:

Current CV's of all team members.

A letter from a faculty mentor at the academic institution of the
individual indicated to receive the travel award.  The letter
should confirm that the individual had substantial participation in
the development of the software, certify her/his student status
when the software began to be developed (and either the current
student status or the date of degree completion), and briefly
discuss the importance of the software to statistical practice.

A brief, one to two page description of the software, summarizing
what it does, how it does it, and why it is an important
contribution.  If the team member competing for the travel
allowance has continued developing the software after finishing
her/his studies, the description should indicate what was developed
when the individual was a student and what has been added since.

An installable software package with its source code for use by the
award committee. It should be accompanied by enough information to allow
the judges to effectively use and evaluate the software (including
its design considerations.)  This information can be provided in a
variety of ways, including but not limited to a user manual (paper
or electronic), a paper, a URL, and online help to the system.

All materials must be in English.  We prefer that electronic text be
submitted in Postscript or PDF.  The entries will be judged on a
variety of dimensions, including the importance and relevance for
statistical practice of the tasks performed by the software, ease of
use, clarity of description, elegance and availability for use by the
statistical community. Preference will be given to those entries that
are grounded in software design rather than calculation.  The decision
of the award committee is final.

All application materials must be received by 5:00pm EST, Monday,
February 21, 2011 at the address below.  The winner will be announced
in May and the award will be given at the 2011 Joint Statistical
Meetings.

Information on the competition can also be accessed on the website of
the Statistical Computing Section (www.statcomputing.org or see the
ASA website, www.amstat.org for a pointer), including the names and
contributions of previous winners.  Inquiries and application
materials should be emailed or mailed to:

Chambers Software Award
c/o Fei Chen
Avaya Labs
233 Mt Airy Rd.
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920
feic@avaya.com