The Washington Monthly College Rankings

This might interest those of you who think that the "standard" rankings of universities leaves something to be desired. The Washington Monthly has just published their second ranking of universities and UW ranks 15 among the national universities (for comparison Harvard is 28!). The following is a quote from the article:

"What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable."

You can find the rankings here and the complete guide with a link to the methodology here. For those of you who would like a digested version of the methodology the guide led to this article in the Washington Post.

Enjoy!

Back in Seattle

I am back! I arrived in Seattle yesterday and will be updating my blog a little more regularly now. The main thing happening right now is that we are looking to hire a junior micro-econometrician. We interviewed a number of good candidates at the ASSA meetings in Boston and we will be deciding on fly-outs soon. I will provide an update when more information is available.

I will also be teaching a course in the microeconomics of development. More on that later.

Development Economics Course at Brown

I have added a link to the undergraduate development economics course that I am currently teaching at Brown. You can find it under "Teaching" in the menu on the left. It is probably mostly of interest to other professors who are setting up a development economics course. I will be teaching a similar course during the Spring quarter at UW, although there will probably be quite a few changes, if for no other reason that I will not have a TA!

Visiting position at Brown

I will a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown for the Fall semester (mid August to mid December). While in Providence I will be based at the Population Studies and Training Center, which just moved in to a very nicely renovated building (the old Historical Society building on Waterman Street). Beside doing research and talking to people about my research ideas, I will also be teaching an undergraduate course in development economics for the Economics Department. Furthermore, I am scheduled to present a paper at the PSTC Colloquia Series and at the NEUDC which will be held at Brown this year. The best way to get in touch with me while I am gone is to use my UW email address, which I will continue to use (and I will probably forward my Brown email to that). You can also try giving me a ring at (401) 863-9411, although I do not have a voice mail yet.

Changing Population Policies in China?

This New York Times article, Fearing Future, China Starts to Give Girls Their Due, is worth reading (required registration). The basic idea is that China is beginning to realise that its sex ratio is unlikely to change by itself in the short run. Therefore, in some areas the local governments have decided in some cases to pay families that already have daughters. This should be in order to persuade more families to have girls. As far as I can tell at least one of the programs is essentially a pension program aimed at parents without children or with only daughters.

New Page for Econ 448

I have set up the web site for Econ 448 - Population Economics, so it now has its own blog for announcements and discussion. If you are a student in that class please stop by on a regular basis.

China's population passes 1.3bn

According to BBC World China's population passed 1.3bn early Thursday with, very fittingly, the birth of a boy. The main interesting statistics in the article is that among registered births boys outnumer girls 120 to 100 (the expected numbers are 105 boys to every 100 girls). The numbers are obviously higher than in India, which is the topic of some of my current research (see this post), but given that India does not have a one-child policy the difference is not a large as one might expect.

Did I Hear Anybody Say "Sample Selection"? -- Why Colleges Think They're Better Than AP (washingtonpost.com)

Tuesday Washington Post's Jay Mathews had an interesting article: Why Colleges Think They're Better Than AP (washingtonpost.com). He discussed whether advance placement classes (for non-US residents that is college-level courses that you can take in high school and get credit for when you enroll in college) were good enough and whether the requirements for getting credit for the course should be thighter. The basic question is whether it is better, in terms of how much you learn, to take an introductory course in, say, calculus in high school instead of when you enroll in college. I do not have a strong opinion either way, but what was interesting was how he defended the AP courses:

I found another selective college has done another small study that reaches a different conclusion. At Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., students who skipped introductory calculus by getting a grade of 4 or 5 in AP calculus AB or BC had an average grade of 11 out of 12 points in its follow-up calculus course. This was better than the average grade of 9.51 for all students in that follow-up course. The same thing happened in Spanish. Students who skipped the equivalent course at Claremont McKenna by scoring 4 or 5 in AP Spanish had an average grade of 11.29 in the college's follow-up course, which was higher than the average grade of 10.68 for all students in that course.

The problem with this arguments is, of course, that it completely ignores any potential selection bias. There are two parts to this. First, the high school students who are more likely to take AP courses are also likely to be "higher ability students" than those who do not. This means that the college students who have take AP courses before entering are also likely to be better or at least more interested in the topic than those who did not. Second, since the average grade is only given for those who scored a 4 or a 5 in their AP, those who got a lower grade are presumably counted with the other students. Hence, it is impossible to tell whether the AP courses were in some sense better or whether they simply attracted better students. What I would argue that Mathews should really be interested in is whether the improvement in students' knowledge is greater from taking a AP course instead of an equivalent college course.

Another study that he mentioned found that:

[those] who got credit for scores of less than 5 did not do as well in follow-up courses as students who had taken the college's introductory courses.

This seems more relevant for the direct question of whether to allow a student to opt out of a introductory course by taking AP courses. Other than for that reason, taking an AP course is simply a signal to the college admission that you are a serious (and bright) student. If that is the case, the question then becomes why do you need an outside company to teach those courses?

On a more general note. Anything that increase what high school students are taught before going to college has my sympathy. I continue to be dismayed about how little students know when they enter college (especially math). Instead of arguing who is best at teaching introductory calculus it makes sense to increase the required level of math in high school and then do the same for the introductory courses at college level (but then again, I am probably biased by the Danish high school system).

Becker-Posner blog

Okay, I know everybody else has already discovered this, but Gary Becker and Richard Posner have set up a new blog: The Becker-Posner Blog. You can read their introduction here. They have this to say about their blog:

We have decided to start a blog that will explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format. Initially we will be posting just once a week, on Mondays. In time we may post more frequently. The first postings will be tomorrow, December 6.

So far they have discussed preventive war and pharmaceutical patents and as you might expect they are all for it :-). Actually, I was a little disappointed about the level of arguments used. I am not quite sure what I expected, but maybe I was hoping to see something which had some evidence of research behind it. More on this blog when they begin writing about things I care a little more about (research wise).

Siwan Anderson seminar on Friday 5 November

Siwan Anderson from UBC will be presenting her paper, "Dowry and Property Rights", on Friday at 2.00 PM in Savery 302. Anybody interested in meeting with her during her visit here please let me know. The abstract for the paper is:

Dowries traditionally serve as a pre-mortem bequest to daughters. In segregated societies, where men have economic value but women do not, dowry as a bequest is consistent with assortative matching in the marriage market. During the early stages of modernisation, increased income inequality across men leads dowries as bequests to no longer be consistent with desired marriage matching patterns. It is demonstrated here that, instead, modernisation necessarily leads to the emergence of dowry as a direct transfer to the groom ("groom-price"). It is then shown that the historical instances of dowry can be classified according to the schema implied by the model. The implications of the model are also tested using current data from Pakistan; a country of some relevance because dowry legislation is currently an active policy debate. The results suggest that the transformation of dowry from bequest to groom-price appears to be underway in some areas.

Nobel Prize to Kydland and Prescott

Kydland and Prescott will receive the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2004"for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". You can find more information on the Nobel web site. For those of us who can remember having read about business cycles in our macro economics courses but are in need a quick recap, there is a nice review of Kydland and Prescott's contributions to the literature.

New blog

In order to make this website a little more dynamic I have decided to introduce a blog. At the moment it will mainly deal with my research, presentations, seminars and other related topics. When I begin teaching again I will probably introduce categories for information and discussion for the courses. Enjoy!