Tag Archives: empirical work

Heckman's talk on inequity

Today, I was so luck to have enjoyed Heckman's speech. As usual, the information is attached here:

MOVE Distinguished Visitor Lecture
Speaker: James Heckman
Date: March 24, 2011

Heckman is well-known for the development of theoretical and empirical models of human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood education.

To be honest, I know Heckman because of his famous contribution to theoretical econometrics - actually, I just learned Heckman two-step estimation this month... Then he came here, and I got the chance to see the "real" version. Out of my expectation, he is such a good speaker! I concentrated on his speech for two continuous hours without a second to relax. OMG... I thought he was a technical guy - from the typical impression he should not care about anything else but math... However, I was totally wrong! He also works a lot on applications and empirical works which reflects the responsibility of a real economist. Like today, he talked about inequity. Although he was going to "sell" his academic idea, it was so good and so intuitive that can really convince you what is going on in the real world. So fresh, and comes to you with tons of inspirations.  Nice~

Tomorrow the more academic-targeted workshop will take place in UAB. Last time when I went to MOVE's workshop, there were only 20 people in a very big lecture hall and some of them were even sleeping... This time, from today's observation, I think there will be over 100 people tomorrow, and a big proportion of them will be brilliant researchers. It should be impressive. The basic info is attached here:

ICREA-MOVE Conference on Family Economics

Program Committee:Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Christopher Flinn, Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and James Heckman
Local organization: Nezih Guner
Date: March 25-26, 2011
Venue: Campus de Bellaterra-UAB

It is so nice to enjoy this kind of high-quality workshop here in Barcelona. Fortunately, I think the school here, as well as those nice organizers, really encourage students to take part in these kinds of seminars. Therefore, most time I can just walk in the conference room and pick a seat without registering in advance. Thank them so much for tolerating me -_-||

Oh one thing at last. Yesterday dear Ghazala also offered a seminar on her own research, which focused on gender difference in the labor market:

LABOUR/PUBLIC/DEVELOPMENT FACULTY LUNCH
Date: 23/03/2011
Speaker: Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer (UPF)
Title: Gender Inequality, Performance Pay and Young Professionals

Since it was her, it had no reason to be not good.Meanwhile, the active audiences were impressive as they had always been.

Moreover, today there was also another Chinese professor who talked about his economic history research,

ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS HISTORY SEMINAR SERIES
Date: 24/03/2011
Speaker: Debin Ma (LSE)
Title: Rock, Scissors, Paper: the Problem of Incentives and Information in Traditional Chinese State and the Origin of Great Divergence

I did not have enough time for this presentation, since the time was a little conflicted with Heckman's speech. However, I stayed there for half an hour and got the basic idea what was going on. It seemed that he was talking about the popular issue "Great Divergence （中文相当于李约瑟之谜）", and reminded me the time when I read Kenneth Pomeranz (彭慕兰)'s book last year:

  • Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton University Press, 2001).

When it comes to China, I cannot just stand there and say "I do not care", right? But the Great Divergence is not only a question on China, but also for the whole world. Institution or technology? All of us are curious which one drives the economy to grow on earth...

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...