University of Melbourne - University of New South Wales - University of Sydney - University of Technology Sydney - University of Queensland
Semester 1 - 2022
Welcome back to the Virtual Australian Health & Human Capital Economics Seminar Series, which goes into its second year. This event is organised by A/Professor Victoria Baranov (UMelb), Dr Sarah Walker (UNSW), Professor Stefanie Schurer (USyd), Dr Rebecca McKibbin (USyd), Professor Adeline Delavande (UTS), and Professor Brenda Gannon (UQ).
The seminar series is open to the public. Sign up HERE for mailing list.
When, How Long & How to Access? We meet every second Wednesday for 60 minutes. The start time depends on the speaker (but no later than 4 pm Sydney/Melbourne time). Reminder emails will be sent out via email. Questions? Please email adeline.delavande@uts.edu.au who is this semesters overall coordinator of the series for questions.
2 March - 11 AM: Muriel Niederle (Stanford University) Zoom Link: https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/82144024695.
Title: Trickle-Down Effects of Affirmative Action: A case Study in France
OUT OF ROUND SEMINAR JOINT WITH UTS ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES
8 March - 9 AM: Phil Oreopolous (University of Toronto) Zoom Link: https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/82231317189.
Title: What does a good teacher sound like? Using machine learning and voice to predict teacher effectiveness.
Abstract: This project proposes a novel yet convenient method to predict a teacher's value-added. Using recent machine learning and deep learning techniques, we analyze audio files of teachers during recorded sessions and identify which teaching practices are most successful are increasing student test scores according to characteristics such as tone, pitch, and frequency of feedback. We also compare this machine learning approach with using humans to predict who is a very high versus very low value added teacher among randomly selected pairs. We hope to investigate whether data analysis by computers may improve predictive power of teacher value added and consider why this may be the case.
16 March - 9 AM Ariel Kalil (University of Chicago) Zoom Link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82848473717.
Title: Nudging or Nagging? Behavioral Approaches to Increasing Parent Reading and Child Literacy Skills.
Abstract: The gap in reading skills between low-income children and their higher income peers emerges very early in life. To help close this gap, we conducted an RCT with low-income parents of young children in Chicago, with the aim of increasing parental reading time through behavioral tools. Parents were given an electronic tablet with over 200 books, and this was used to track the total number of minutes parents read to their children using the tablet for 11 months. We also measured child literacy skills. Parents were randomized into 4 groups: 1) a control group, and groups that received 2) just the tablet, 3) tablet with reminder texts, and 4) tablet with goal-setting texts. Relative to the group that only received the tablet, we found that the goal-setting group read significantly more (0.5 SD) but had no significant difference in test scores. Unexpectedly, the reminders group scored significantly lower than the group that just received tablets, despite no significant difference in reading time. This demonstrates that nudging might have an unintended consequence of reducing the quality of task (reading) that people are nudged to do. Despite this, technology such as a tablet with books may help close the achievement gap in reading: the pooled average test score across all 3 treatment groups that received tablets was significantly higher (0.19 SD) than the control group that did not receive a tablet. All results are robust to controlling for baseline literacy scores, age, and school fixed effects.
30 March - 9 AM Alex Hollingsworth (Indiana University) Zoom Link: https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/88698137071.
Title: A thousand cuts: Cumulative lead exposure and academic achievement.
Abstract: We study how ambient lead exposure impacts learning in elementary school by leveraging a natural experiment where a large national automotive racing organization switched from leaded to unleaded fuel. We find increased levels and duration of exposure to lead negatively affect academic performance, shift the entire academic performance distribution, and negatively impact both younger and older children. The average treated student in our setting has an expected income reduction of $5,200 in present value terms. Avoiding said treatment has an effect size similar to improving teacher value added by one-fourth of a standard deviation, reducing class size by 5 students, or increasing school spending per pupil by $750. The marginal impacts of lead are larger in impoverished, non-white counties, and among students with greater duration of exposure, even after controlling for the total quantity of exposure.
13 April - 9 AM Maggie Jones (University of Victoria). Zoom Link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82325629744.
Title: The Intergenerational Legacy of Indian Residential Schools.
Abstract: From the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century, colonial governments in the United States, Canada, Greenland, Australia, and New Zealand, operated, in collaboration with Christian churches, a network of boarding schools for Indigenous children. The purpose of this system was to culturally and economically assimilate; Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed into residential schools where they were to be converted into the Eurocentric culture of the dominant society. Using a unique restricted-access database from Canada that asked Indigenous respondents about their family history with residential schools, in addition to questions on a variety of socioeconomic outcomes, I study the intergenerational effects of these schools. Despite previous research showing that residential schools led to increased human capital accumulation among those who attended, I find that residential schools are associated with lower educational attainment among subsequent generations. I present evidence consistent with the notion that both cultural detachment and a breakdown in family relationships contributed to a reversal of the standard relationship between the human capital of parents and children. Encouragingly, I find that cultural interventions may provide a buffer to the harmful legacy of this historical trauma, suggesting an avenue for the direction of future policy.
NOTE THERE WILL BE A THREE WEEK GAP BETWEEN SEMINARS BECAUSE OF THE EASTER BREAK - NO SEMINAR ON 27 APRIL - WE'LL RESUME ON 4 MAY
4 May - 4 PM Barbara Biasi (Yale University). Zoom Link https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/82993811657 . Title: Career Effects of Mental Health. Abstract: How large are the economic effects of innovations in treating mental health conditions? We study this question in the context of a major change in the treatment of bipolar disorder (BD), after the approval of lithium in 1976. Using individual-level data on diagnoses and earnings, we estimate the effects of access to lithium as the difference in the labor market penalties of BD between cohorts who had access to improved treatments at different stages of life, controlling for family fixed effects. We find that people with BD who gained access to treatment at age 10 earned 42 percent more compared with people with BD with access at age 20; they were also 94 less likely to have zero earnings. People from low-income families benefit most from innovations in treatment. Benchmark comparisons with earnings penalties for depression and schizophrenia, indicate large potential gains from comparable advances for other mental health disorders.
18 May - 4 PM Teodora Boneva (University of Bonn). Zoom Link https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/89245377886.
Title: Maternal Labor Supply: Perceived Returns, Constraints, and Social Norms.
Abstract: We design a new survey to elicit quantifiable, interpersonally comparable beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits and costs to maternal labor supply decisions, to study how beliefs vary across and within different groups in the population and to analyze how those beliefs relate to choices. In terms of pecuniary returns, mothers’ (and fathers’) later-life earnings are perceived to increase the more hours the mother works while her child is young. Similarly, respondents perceive higher non-pecuniary returns to children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills the more hours a mother works and the more time her child spends in childcare. Family outcomes on the other hand, such as the quality of the mother-child relationship and child satisfaction, are perceived to be the highest when the mother works part-time, which is also the option most respondents believe their friends and family would like them to choose. There is a large heterogeneity in the perceived availability of full-time childcare and relaxing constraints could substantially increase maternal labor supply. Importantly, it is perceptions about the non-pecuniary returns to maternal labor supply as well as beliefs about the opinions of friends and family that are found to be strong predictors of maternal labor supply decisions, while beliefs about labor market returns are not. Paper
8 June - 4 PM Kate Orkin (University of Oxford). Zoom Link https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/85952932988 Title: Aspirations, Assets and Anti-Poverty Policies. Abstract: In rural Kenya, higher aspirations for one's future economic outcomes are associated with higher investment in income-generating activities and labour supply, suggesting that raising people's aspirations might improve these outcomes. In a field experiment, we study the effects of a psychological intervention which trains recipients to set realistic medium-term aspirations for improving their lives and define concrete steps and plans to achieve them, particularly in the domain of their economic activities. After 17 months, the treated group increases both labour supply and spending on income-generating activities, earn higher revenue, and are able to finance higher consumption and asset accumulation. In this setting, the intervention is nearly twice as cost-effective in terms of effects on consumption and assets as a widely scaled large unconditional cash transfer programme. The intervention increases aspirations, but has no effects on a number of other psychological mechanisms. These results are consistent with a model of reference-dependent utility, in which the intervention raises current investment by raising individuals' reference point -- or aspirations -- for future economic outcomes.
22 June - 10 AM Tom Vogl (University of California San Diego). Zoom Link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/89575162009 Title: Fertility and the Education of Parents and Children in Africa. Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits higher fertility and lower education than the rest of the world. Economic and demographic theory posit that these phenomena are linked in a common decision problem, so that fertility decline coincides with education growth among both adults and children. Using microdata from 33 African countries, this paper documents how adult education, fertility, and child investment coevolve across successive female birth cohorts within countries or sub-national regions. Fertility decline is associated with growth in children's grade attainment but not enrollment. The discordance is mirrored by a split in how trends in women's education relate to trends in fertility and child outcomes. Rising women's education predicts declining fertility and rising children's grade attainment but is unrelated to enrollment growth.
Semester 2 - 2022
10 Aug- 9 AM Manasi Deshpande (University of Chicago)
7 Sep - 9 AM Marcella Alsan (Harvard University)
12 Oct - 9 AM Gautam Rao (Harvard University)
26 Oct - 9 AM TBC
9 Nov - 9 AM Lance Lochner (University of Western Ontario)
23 Nov - 9 AM Berk Özler (World Bank Development Research Group)
14 Dec - 9 AM Prashant Bharadwaj (University of California, San Diego)