Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label students. Show all posts

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Ariel Pakes celebrated at the Nemmers Prize conference

 Ariel Pakes could certainly also win the prize for being loved by his students and colleagues: 

CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF ARIEL PAKES






Saturday, September 9, 2023

Computer science award

A computer scientist whose work I follow has won an award that reflects on both his teachers and students.

Aaron Roth receives 2023 CyLab Distinguished Alumni Award 

"Aaron Roth, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named CyLab's 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award winner.

...

"Roth earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010, where he was advised by former CMU Professor Avrim Blum. His dissertation, 'New Algorithms for Preserving Differential Privacy,' gave new methods for performing computations on private data.

"Nominated by his former advisee, now Assistant Professor in CMU's School of Computer Science, Steven Wu, the award recognizes Roth's excellence in algorithms and machine learning, leadership in the field, and commitment to his students.

"As my advisor, Aaron is nothing less than a beacon of inspiration, marked by his relentless curiosity, exceptional instinct for identifying the most exciting questions, creative problem-solving acumen, and impeccable eloquence in communication," said Wu.

"Advising is one of the best parts of my job," said Roth. "Being recognized by one of my former students at the University where I earned my Ph.D. is really special."

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Paying it forward

 Scott Cunningham, an economist who devotes a lot of his efforts to providing public goods, recently had a post on the phrase "paying it forward." He writes that he connected it with a movie with a similar name, but has recently come to view it differently (for reasons I find too embarrassing to quote, but related to the fact that I use the phrase now and then.)

Wikipedia says "Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying the kindness to others instead of to the original benefactor."  It goes on to say "Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel Between Planets helped popularize the phrase."  I could have first seen it there, as I read much of Heinlein's science fiction when I was a boy.

My associations with the phrase now mostly come from the motivations and actions of some living kidney donors, particularly in kidney exchange chains.

The phrase is certainly is evocative of what we do so much of in academia (when we're doing academia well): it describes the relationship between studying and teaching, and between teachers and students.

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Scott's post announced that, as part of paying things forward, he's funding a prize for young economists.



Monday, June 19, 2023

Stanford graduation--Alex Chan, Ph.D.

 Congratulations Dr. Chan.



Welcome to the club, Alex.

Monday, June 5, 2023

Friday, June 2, 2023

Dissertation advisors and job market outcomes by Rose and Shekhar

 Here's a paper on the economics job market, and the influence of dissertation advisers.

Adviser Connectedness and Placement Outcomes in the Economics Job Market, by Michael E. Rose and Suraj Shekhar, forthcoming in Labour Economics

Abstract: We study the role of social networks in the academic job market for graduate students of Economics. We find that the connectedness of a student’s advisor in the coauthor network significantly improves her job market outcome. We use two identification strategies and find that a) higher Eigenvector centrality of an adviser leads to her student getting placed at a better ranked institution, and b) larger distance between an adviser and an institution decreases the probability that her students are placed there. Our study sheds light on the importance of social connections in a labour market where information frictions regarding job openings are virtually absent.

...

"Our setting, the academic job market for Economists, is special in that information frictions regarding job openings are (almost) absent due to Job Openings for Economists. Thus, our finding that social networks play a role in this market is likely because they help decrease the uncertainty about an applicant’s quality."

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I'm reminded of the timeless joke about how rabbits eat wolves: if you don't know it, there are many versions on the internet, here  (and this one comes with a bonus joke: Rabbit's Ph.D. Thesis and Lion's Watch Repair Business).

Monday, March 27, 2023

Alex Chan

 Congratulations, Alex.

I will join as an Assistant Professor next academic year! 🙏🙏 to the sacrifices my family made for me + their support… #HBS #FirstGen + my advisors who made this dream possible #AlRoth
@Stanford


And earlier (in October)

Welcome to the club, Alex.

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Erling Skancke defends his dissertation

 Erling Skancke defended his dissertation last week:


Here's his job market paper:


Welfare and Strategic Externalities in Matching Markets with Interviews (Job Market Paper)
Recent debate in the medical literature has raised concerns about the pre-match interview process for residency and fellowship positions at hospitals. However, little is known about the economics of this decentralized process. In this paper, I build a game-theoretic model in which hospitals conduct costly interviews in order to learn their preferences over doctors. I show that increased interview activity by any hospital imposes an unambiguous negative welfare externality on all other hospitals. In equilibrium, both hospitals and doctors may be better off by a coordinated reduction in interview activity. The strategic externality is more subtle, and conditions are derived under which the game exhibits either strategic complementarities or substitutes. Moreover, an increase in market size may exacerbate the inefficiencies of the interview process, preventing agents from reaping the thick market benefits that would arise in the absence of the costly interviews. This effect increases participants' incentives to match outside of the centralized clearinghouse as markets become thicker, jeopardizing the long-term viability of the clearinghouse. The model also provides new insights into several market design interventions that have recently been proposed.

Congratulations, Erling! 
Welcome to the club.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

David Zuckerman defends his dissertation

 David Zuckerman defended his dissertation yesterday.


Here are the papers he defended:

Preferences for Compensatory and Retributive Justice

I experimentally investigate third-party preferences for victim compensation and offender punishment when one party has harmed another. I find that if the harm is intentional, third parties not only display an increased demand for punishment, but also an increased demand for compensation. I refer to these additional demands for punishment and compensation as the demand for retributive justice and compensatory justice, respectively. Demand for retributive justice is positively correlated with demand for compensatory justice. However, third parties do not treat the two types of justice as substitutes or complements. Moreover, I generally find that these types of justices do not take victim knowledge of offender punishment nor offender knowledge of victim compensation into account. I then extend my investigation to a risky setting, where the offender's action may or may not end up harming the victim. I find that for both compensation and punishment, not only does the intent behind the action matter, but the consequences of the action as well. However, this is primarily driven by third-party distributional preferences; the outcome does not seem to affect the demand for retributive or compensatory justice.


A Theory of Chosen Preferences

(with B. Douglas Bernheim, Luca Braghieri, and Alejandro Martínez) [Online Appendix] [2019 Working Paper Version]

American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 2 (February 2021), pages 720-754

We propose and develop a theory of preference formation based on the idea that people evaluate their lives according to worldviews that provide accounts of success and failure, and that they choose those worldviews subject to feasibility constraints. Our framework highlights the role of mindset ï¬,exibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision maker places on her current and anticipated worldviews when evaluating future outcomes. We show that our theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, thereby illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential accounts for a variety of observed phenomena.


Unseen Preferences: Homophily in Friendship Networks

Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Homophily is typically measured using a single dimension to define groups. However, people generally display preferences over multiple dimensions. I develop a simple model that characterizes agents both by a (discrete) "type" and a (continuous) "personality" value. Agents have preferences-for-similarity over both dimensions, but homophily is only measured with respect to type. I identify sufficient conditions on preferences such that a strongly stable matching exists, and show via simulations that the friendship patterns generated by these matchings qualitatively line up with several patterns noted in the data. The matchings can be calculated via an algorithm where agents "search" through utility space for friends. Increasing costs to friendship cause both within-group and systematic across-group heterogeneity in the extent of students' search through utility space. Majority-group "outliers" - those who must search an extensive amount in utility space for friends - form a disproportionate number of cross-group friendships. These outliers are the key reason why mid-sized groups exhibit the highest levels of homophily bias, a distinctive feature noted in prior literature.


Mazel tov, David.  Welcome to the club.

Friday, April 8, 2022

Süleyman Kerimov defends his dissertation

 Süleyman Kerimov defended his dissertation yesterday, in Stanford's MS&E department. He studies matching, and will teach at Rice next year.



His main advisors are both named Itai.

These are the papers he spoke about:

  • Dynamic Matching: Characterizing and Achieving Constant Regret, with Itai Ashlagi and Itai Gurvich. [pdf] [SSRN]

  • Scrip Systems with Minimal Availability, with Itai Ashlagi, working paper.
    • Appeared as an extended abstract in the 15th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2019).

Mazel tov and tebrikler, Suleyman.

Welcome to the club.


Saturday, December 18, 2021

70: three score years and ten

 If you persist, you find that 70 isn't nearly as old as you once imagined it to be (and  as it used to be, maybe not even that long ago). Certainly three score years and ten is no longer an inspirationally long life.

(The Hebrew verse 10 of Psalm 90 simply says "70 years." I think that "three score and ten" is a flourish originally introduced in the King James translation.

יְמֵי-שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore years...")


Earlier this month I was surprised at what I thought would be only a Hanukkah party, by a pre-birthday celebration in which a number of my students located a pretty big group of my former students and postdocs to produce this video of birthday greetings and reminisces. 

I've been lucky in my students and young colleagues, long ago and still today.  Thanks to Alex and the local gang, to all those on the video, and to all those who weren't found by the surprise team, who are all remembered fondly and gratefully...

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Alejandro Martínez-Marquina defends his dissertation

 Alejandro Martínez-Marquina defended his dissertation this week.

 The three papers he chose for his dissertation are these:

When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain

(with Christina Kent) [Slides] [Draft]

"How do local wealth shocks impact economic activity? For over two centuries, Spain has conducted a national lottery which often results in the random allocation of up to $800 million in cash to the citizens of one town. This is the only case in the world where individuals living in the same location randomly receive pure wealth shocks of this scale. Leveraging data on town-level lottery ticket expenditures, we compare winning towns to non-winning towns that had the same probability of winning. We find that although consumption increases, the lottery causes a slowdown in economic activity and deters new migration to towns that won in recent decades. However, an analysis of a century of lottery winners reveals large and persistent increases in population for towns that won in earlier periods."


The Burden of Household Debt

(with Mike Shi)

"We propose that holding debt causes worse financial decisions using a novel experimental design where we randomly assign debt. Our design isolates the consequences of holding debt while controlling for potential confounding factors such as initial wealth levels, selection, risk, and time preferences. Our findings show that debt causes behavioral biases detrimental to subjects' financial payoffs. However, subjects' strategies are not random but instead debt-biased, consistent with an additional penalty for holding negative balances. We refer to the financial losses caused by debt as the Burden of Debt and provide evidence that, under certain circumstances, these behavioral biases can compound and lead to substantial losses. Furthermore, we show in additional treatments how these debt-biased behaviors can also deter subjects from borrowing and forego profitable opportunities."


Ingraining Traditional Gender Roles in the Classroom: Evidence from the Spanish Social Service

[Slides]

"This study uses a regression discontinuity framework to examine the long- run effects of conservative education on women's' family and labor decisions. In 1939, the Spanish dictatorship created the Social service, a compulsory 6- month training program aimed at relegating women to the roles of mothers and housewives. We exploit the discontinuity induced by the sudden abolition of the Social Service, in addition to variation in the age of enrollment, to examine the consequences of attending the program. Using historical enrollment records and the universe of birth certificates, we find the Social Service was successful in instilling the regime's ideology. Women exposed to the class get married and have kids at younger ages, consistent with the desire to form a family sooner. In addition, they are more likely to declare being housewives when their first child is born. Future work will explore the underlying mechanisms and the effects on children by surveying women who enrolled around abolition."


Welcome to the club, Alejandro.

Aleandro ( top center) with Chenzi Xu, Muriel Niederle, Doug Bernheim, Al Roth, Ran Abramitzky


Saturday, May 8, 2021

Akhil Vohra and Mike Shi defend their dissertations

 We're still locked out of the Economics building, but science progresses and dissertations are defended.  I've been remiss in celebrating them: here are two recent ones.

Akhil Vohra, whose job market paper I blogged about  here.

Akhil Vohra (top center) with Al Roth, Itai Ashlagi, Matt Jackson, Gabe Carroll and Fuhito Kojima


And Mike Shi, one of whose papers is this one:

The Burden of Household Debt  By ALEJANDRO MART´INEZ-MARQUINA and MIKE SHI *


Mike Shi (upper right) with Al Roth, Jeremy Bulow, Muriel Niederle, Luigi Pistaferri, and Nick Bloom

Welcome to the club, Akhil and Mike.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Poets and Quants celebrates Professor Övül Sezer

Two days ago I received a note of encouragement by email from Övül Sezer, a former student in my Harvard class on experimental economics, which she spoke about while being celebrated by Poets and Quants.

2020 Best 40 Under 40 Professors: Övül Sezer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School

 BY: NATHAN ALLEN

Here's that Q&A from her interview:

"Professor I most admire and why:

"There have been so many professors who inspired me and influenced me in several ways and I am so grateful for all the things I learned from them. But one class that I took in college changed the course of my path. Back in college, I was studying math, spending a lot of time on equations and mathematical proofs. In a very serendipitous way, I ended up trying to take a graduate-level economics class, called “Experimental Economics” because I wanted to take a class where I didn’t have to do any weekly “problem set” but it still counted as credit. To be able to take the class as an undergrad, I needed the professor’s permission. The professor teaching the course happened to be Al Roth, who allowed me to the class and introduced me to the love of experiments. Through him, I started learning a lot about experiments, and how we can take our very own observations about life and test them. This was the first time I fell in love with experimental science, and this is where I am today. In addition to being a great professor, Al Roth is also a very thoughtful and a kind person. I feel tremendously grateful to have taken that class."

Monday, May 18, 2020

Qingyun Wu defends his dissertation--remotely

Qingyun Wu successfully defended his dissertation at Stanford today, remotely, as we are all sheltering in place from the coronavirus pandemic.


He presented three papers, the screenshot above is from the third.

1. The lattice of envy-free matchings." Games and Economic Behavior 109 (2018): 201-211.
2 Entering Classes in the College Admissions Model." 
3 "Forbidden Transactions and Black Markets." 

Welcome to the club, Qingyun.

Friday, January 24, 2020

Sam Trejo on non-directed kidney donation (in the LA Times)

It's always good to hear from former students.

Sam Trejo writes:


"Hi Dr. Roth,
I'm PhD student in the GSE who took your Behavioral class a couple years back; you probably don't remember me, I didn't talk very much. Anyways, I donated my kidney last month to start a chain and wrote about it here. Just wanted to let you know of a concrete way that your market design work is making an impact!

Best,
Sam"

The op-ed he linked to in the LA Times is called:
By SAM TREJO, JAN. 19, 2020 






Sunday, December 29, 2019

U.S medical school enrollments by sex: women outnumber men for the first time

There are now more women than men applying to U.S. medical schools, being accepted (to the first year class) and enrolled (in all four years). See the 2019 Fall Applicant, Matriculant, and Enrollment Data Tables from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC)

xxx



Here's the recent history leading up to this:



In the 1950's, almost all medical school grads were men. As the number of women grew, the medical labor market had to start accomodating married couples both looking for residencies.  This is the first year in which the total enrollment of women exceeds that of men, but of course the last few years have seen that coming in the number of women matriculating: women first-year medical students outnumbered men already in 2017..

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Here's a news story from the Washington Post about these statistics:
The Big Number: Women now outnumber men in medical schools
By Linda Searing Dec. 23, 2019

"In the medical profession overall, male doctors still outnumber female doctors, 64 percent to 36 percent, according to 2019 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. But that may be changing, according to a report from the health-care company AthenaHealth. Its survey of 18,000 physicians at 3,500 practices on its network found that, in 2017, 80 percent of doctors 65 and older were men, but 60 percent of doctors younger than 35 were women. The disparity between male and female doctors appears to extend to their chosen field of specialization. A joint report this fall from the American Medical Association and AAMC finds that male doctors dominate orthopedic surgery (85 percent), neurological surgery (82 percent) and interventional radiology (81 percent), and female doctors dominate obstetrics and gynecology (83 percent), allergy and immunology (74 percent) and pediatrics (72 percent). Specialties with a nearly equal balance of male and female doctors are sleep medicine, preventive medicine, pathology and psychiatry. Overall, medical schools this year experienced about a 1 percent increase in applicants and in new enrollees, which the AAMC says contributes to an enrollment growth of 33 percent since 2002. Still, it notes, the country faces a projected shortage of 122,000 doctors by 2032."

Friday, July 5, 2019

Exchange programs requiring balanced exchange, by Dur and Ünver

Some exchange programs require balance--such as exchanges of students among colleges, e.g. for study abroad.  Here's a paper addressing that in the JPE, with some impossibility results and a constrained optimality approach:

Two-Sided Matching via Balanced Exchange
Umut Mert Dur, North Carolina State University
and
M. Utku Ünver, Boston College and Deakin University
Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 3 (June 2019): 1156-1177.

Abstract  We introduce a new matching model to mimic two-sided exchange programs such as tuition and worker exchanges, in which export-import balances are required for longevity of programs. These exchanges use decentralized markets, making it difficult to achieve this goal. We introduce the two-sided top trading cycles, the unique mechanism that is balanced-efficient, worker-strategy-proof, acceptable, individually rational, and respecting priority bylaws regarding worker eligibility. Moreover, it encourages exchange, because full participation induces a dominant-strategy equilibrium for firms. We extend it to dynamic settings permitting tolerable yearly imbalances and demonstrate that its regular and tolerable versions perform considerably better than models of current practice.
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Here's an earlier post about an exchange program of the kind addressed in the paper:

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday, April 5, 2019

Repugnance watch: romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students

Forty plus years ago, I met and married my wife when I was an assistant professor and she was a graduate student in another department. Since then I've paid attention to changes in norms that might have made our relationship illicit, such as this recent change of policies at Princeton.

Princeton updates its policy regarding sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students
by the Office of Communications
"Princeton University has strengthened its policy regarding sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students.

"During the Faculty Meeting on Monday, April 1, faculty voted to approve a policy that prohibits all faculty from initiating or engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with graduate students. Previously, faculty were prohibited only from initiating or engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with graduate students over whom they had advising, instruction or supervisory responsibilities. The new policy includes exemptions for pre-existing relationships.

...

"Existing University policy already prohibits all romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduates.

“It is important to note that this prohibition, and therefore any disciplinary consequences, fall entirely on the faculty. That is, this policy change will not result in any disciplinary consequences for graduate students,” Dean of the Graduate School Sarah-Jane Leslie said in a statement emailed to graduate students.
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Here is the relevant paragraph from
Rules and Procedures of the Faculty of Princeton University and Other Provisions of Concern to the Faculty
As of 2019-04-03

"1. Prohibition of Consensual Relations with Students: Faculty members shall not initiate or engage in romantic or sexual behavior with undergraduate or graduate students. This prohibition encompasses both enrolled and prospective students, and includes students from other institutions who come to Princeton for pre-baccalaureate, post-baccalaureate, visiting, summer, or other programs or courses of study. For purposes of this policy, faculty members include members of the University community whose primary appointment is one of the following: tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, nstructors, all ranks of lecturers, and visiting faculty. "

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Masataka Mori, Sensei (1938-2018)

OBITUARY OF MASATAKA MORI

Masataka Mori of Closter, age 85, born in Fukuoka, Japan, he attended Takushoku University and became captain of the Karate team. He came to the United States in 1963 as a karate instructor for the Japan Karate Association of Hawaii.   In 1968, he and his family moved to New York City, where he became the Chief Instructor of the JKA of New York and the Chief Instructor of JKA-Shotokan Karate-do International and attained the 9th Dan. In addition to teaching at his dojo, he had taught for years at New York colleges, including SUNY at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and CUNY, as well as a local schools, the Japanese Children’s Society. He often travelled abroad, acting as tournament arbitrator or judge, or teaching at various seminars.  This year marks his 50th year of teaching in New York City. He was an avid golf enthusiast and often participated in locally hosted Japanese American events.  Masataka Mori passed peacefully at his home in Closter, where he lived and gardened for forty years, surrounded by his devoted family. He is survived by Keiko, his wife of 61 years, his daughters Mayumi and Sayuri, their spouses Stephen and Alex, his four grandchildren, Allison, Kimiko, Andrew, Natalie, and Alexa and Kaitlin.
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The Talmud advises us to "Provide for yourself a teacher and get yourself a friend..." Mori Sensei was a great teacher and an inspiring friend. I met him when I matriculated at Columbia in 1968, and his teaching and friendship were among the most memorable and important parts of my years there.

I last saw Sensei Mori in 2013, and my wife Emilie finally got a chance to meet him, after often hearing about him:
Sunday, June 9, 2013
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Here's a video of a recent basics class (which even advanced students take with some regularity, to go over the very basic movements that are taught to beginners), which reminded me of learning the unfamiliar commands in 1968, and sometimes not being completely sure which were in Japanese and which in English...