Academic discrimination audits

Profs in fields where the opportunity cost of time are more valuable use tighter filters in deciding whether to reply to an email; that filter may have discriminatory effect.

Milkman et al run a field experiment sending academics in a pile of fields the following email:

Dear Professor [Surname of Professor Inserted Here],

I am writing you because I am a prospective doctoral student with considerable interest in your research. My plan is to apply to doctoral programs this coming fall, and I am eager to learn as much as I can about research opportunities in the meantime.

I will be on campus today/[next Monday], and although I know it is short notice, I was
wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research. Any time that would be convenient for you would be fine with me, as meeting with you is my first priority during this campus visit.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,
[Student’s Full Name Inserted Here] 

If you're an academic, you're probably getting pretty frequent form-letter-style emails from students wishing graduate supervision. You're probably also getting a billion other emails - you need a way to triage. 

I'm not particularly proud of it, but there's one tranche that just gets the delete button: emails sent that are clearly form letters of the following type:

Dear Professor (name in different font)",

I am writing seeking supervision in [field in different font, or named field far different from anything I research] at [University name in different font]. 

[Describes work experience tangentially related to proposed field of study, or a research project coming from his/her undergraduate study. Or suggests willingness to write a thesis in anything, if I have scholarship money. Generally reveals no understanding of what I'm interested in, no particular interest in Canterbury over other places, and provides no expectation that an answer's really expected - zero investment in this application over others. It's clearly a mass-broadcast distribution.]

There are many many potential students in many countries who seem more interested in getting a student visa out than really in pursuing a thesis. My replying would waste everyone's time, as, until recently, I had no potential funding for graduate students, and none of these students could go anywhere without funding.

I don't get dozens of these emails a day; more likely a dozen or more a month. I imagine that if I were at a top US school, I'd be getting rather more of them. I'd definitely reply to a letter like the one they sent out, because very few of the academic spam emails I get ever suggest a personal meeting: if a potential student would take the time to get to Christchurch, why wouldn't I at least reply?

But then I imagine what it would be like if I were in a city of several million people, with loads of internationals students in town seeking extensions of their undergraduate student visas. Signing up at grad school extends the visa: the prof needs some way of distinguishing emails from people who are actually interested in pursuing study, and those for whom it's just a way of extending the visa.

Anybody who really had come all the way to my town and wanted desperately to meet with me would find some way of signalling that in the intro email. Like "I liked your work on [fill in the appropriate blank] and want to extend it [proposes some relevant extension]." Not "I have considerable interest in your research."

Based ONLY on time constraints and visa-seeking behaviour, I would expect the following:

• The greater the number of these solicitations received, by field, the more likely there'll be no reply;
• Fields more likely to have scholarship money or RA work will get more such solicitations;
• Profs in fields getting more of these kinds of solicitations will use tighter filters in deciding what to delete;
• One not-nice but non-crazy filter is to downweight emails from foreign-sounding names where the correspondent reveals zero real knowledge of the prof's work or field. The slightest signal that this indicates actual interest in the prof's work would go a long way. Otherwise, a Bayesian reckons the person sending the email either doesn't know enough to signal an actual knowledge of the prof's work (a bad signal in itself), or really is more interested in something other than the prof's work - like a visa. We should expect then no particular gender effects, no particular difference between Caucasian and Black names, but a difference between those and ones that have a higher probability of being a student on international visa. 

Here's what the paper finds:

Here is the rank order of the gap, on average across all disciplines:

• Chinese female at Private School: -29%
• Indian Male, Private School: -21%
• Indian Female, Private School: -19%
• Hispanic Male, Private School: -18%
• Chinese Female, Public School: -17%
• Black Female, Private School: -16%
• Black Male, Private School: -14%
• Indian Male, Public School: -13%
• Chinese Male, Private School: -11%
• Chinese Male, Public School -10%

All others below 10%. 

If all that were going on were filtering based on "weed out students who have indicated no interest in my research and who are more likely to be international", I'd have expected Chinese males to have fared worse than Blacks or Hispanics; I doubt that my story is all that's going on. I do expect that it's an important part of what's going on, but only part of it. In particular, I can't see how this story explains within-race gender gaps. But I do note that the only substantial discrimination among those at public universities was against foreign-sounding names. 

I wonder what would have happened if the field experimenters had spent a couple minutes, when getting the contact and other details for each prof in the study, also getting the abstract from that prof's most recent paper and saying something about it in the letter. If my story's explaining part of what's here going on, then the gap between foreign-sounding and domestic-sounding names should drop. 

Finally, I always wonder about these kinds of studies and whether race is the only thing signalled. Would the results have been the same if one of the white-sounding names were Cleetus?

Minor in Economics

Stephen Franks makes the case for ensuring that your BA include a Minor in Economics. He doesn't put it that way directly, but it's the best possible solution to this problem:

I would be surprised if any employers have a definitive interest in a BA degree holders' specialist knowledge even where they have decided that a BA is sufficient. It is perhaps nice to think that the graduate has acquired the polish of some minimum familiarity with our civilisation's accumulated self awareness. General knowledge may reflect and stimulate comprehension of events and people (perhaps?). But if the graduate proves to have that store of information it will commonly be a bonus, not the object of preferring a degree holder.

Employers may look to see what the BA  job-seeker has studied nevertheless. But more often than any teacher might want to know, it is probably just to see whether the degree contains anything that might have tested for rigour, objectivity, or ability to write. If all the subjects are of the social science/basket-weaving/tell-us-your feelings-and-fashionable-political-prejudices variety, or are otherwise notorious for low standards, the degree may be termed useless. But that is not because of greater need for the intrinsic knowledge of the subjects. It is simply that the choice of subjects is thought to be indicative of the fineness of the sieve. What is most likely to be taught and examined more rigorously?

Economics is generally known for having a tight sieve. Major in your passion! But add Economics as a minor to demonstrate your competence and to gain a far better understanding of your major, whether it be history, political science, philosophy....

I note that I started off in undergrad as an Arts major mixing history, political science, French, and economics. I continued with history, pols and Econ at 200-level, then went double-honours Econ/Pols before heading to grad school. I might not have added economics had I not worried about employability with a single-major Pols degree. I added Economics instrumentally, but came to love it.

Lock-in, path dependence, and government

Twenty years ago, all the hip folks thought a great argument for government intervention was that markets could be subject to inefficient lock-in. Paul David and Brian Arthur were the most famous proponents of this line of argument. In that world, it could make sense for government to put in place mechanisms to slow down adoption of particular standards so we could make sure the right one was adopted. Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis nicely showed not only that no historical cases really matched the Arthur/David story, but also that the scope for beneficial intervention was pretty slim when viewed correctly from an ex ante perspective: the costs of the delay were certain, and how could we really tell which delays, if any, would really prove worthwhile? See here for related discussion.

Today's example of pernicious lock-in: governments can take rather a long time to rescind dumb laws.

In 1982 Marshfield, Massachusetts banned coin-operated video games. Over the years many have tried to get the law reversed and failed. But the good news is that Marshfield lifted the long-standing ban this week. On Monday, residents of the small town voted 203-175 to overturn the bylaw and welcome arcade gaming back into town. To put this ban into perspective, that's a 32 year ban on playing arcade games; compared to China's 14 year ban on console games lifted this year. Incredible!

So what caused arcade games to be banned in the first place? Apparently residents believed that arcade games attracted an "undesirable element." In 1983 the ban was challenged and upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, based on the rationale that video games are "addictive to youth, who will skip school and spend unreasonable sums of money to play them at a quarter -- and sometimes 50 cents."

At least that's what Thomas R. Jackson, a retired narcotics agent and the resident who proposed the ban, said at the time. He also alleged at the time that gambling and drug activity were connected to the video game locations where youth "congregate unsupervised."

Read the whole thing.

I suppose that the silver lining could be that nobody in town's really had a go at an old Galaga machine, or Ms Pac-Man, or Zaxxon. They could open a retro 1980s gaming palace, imagining that the place has just opened subsequent to the failure of the 1982 law, with machines from 1982 and earlier only. Then bring in some 1983 machines next year. While it would be ridiculously fun for folks there now, it hardly outweighs the losses incurred over the last 30 years.

Lousy lock-in. If only government could protect us from it.

HT: The twitter feed of the NZ Office of Film and Literature Classification, the censorship board whose decisions of decades ago, banning all kinds of stuff now considered tame, continue to be in force until and unless somebody makes application for a reconsideration.

Democracy in Decline

Professor James Allan will be discussing his book, Democracy in Decline, at the University of Canterbury on Wednesday, 14 May. Here's the blurb; you can register for the event at the link.

The New Zealand Initiative invites you to the launch of James Allan's new book Democracy in Decline. Professor Allan will speak at public events in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch on 12, 13 and 14 May.

Democracy in Decline charts how democracy is being diluted and restricted in five of the world's oldest democracies – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. James Allan targets four main, interconnected causes of decline – judicial activism, the transformation and growth of international law, the development of supranational organisations, and the presence of undemocratic elites.

He presents a convincing argument that the same trends are occurring whether the country has a constitutional bill of rights (United States and Canada), a statutory bill of rights (the United Kingdom and New Zealand), or no bill of rights at all (Australia).

Identifying tactics used by lawyers, judges, and international bureaucrats to deny that any decline has occurred, Allan looks ahead to further deterioration caused by attacks on free speech, intolerant worldviews, internationalisation through treaties and conventions, and illegal immigration. Social and political decisions, Allan argues, must be based on counting every adult in a nation state as equal.

Professors Allan's lecture will be of interest to anyone concerned with majority rule and fairness in numbers.

About the speaker:

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. He is a native born Canadian who practised law at a large firm in Toronto and then at the Bar in London before moving to teach law in Hong Kong, New Zealand and then Australia.

Allan has published widely in the areas of constitutional law, legal philosophy and bill of rights scepticism. He also writes regularly for weeklies and monthlies including being a regular contributor to The Australian, The Spectator Australia, and Quadrant. He was elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in 2011.

Allan worked in the Faculty of Law, University of Otago for 11 years, from 1993 to 2004. During that time he was a regular contributor to the National Business Review.

The event at Canterbury is being facilitated by our excellent Economics & Finance Student Society.

I will be attending and plan on harassing James a little.

While I entirely side with him in favour of individual choice over elite choice in our personal lives, I'm more sceptical about it when it comes to "undemocratic elites" versus the median voter. Sure, "undemocratic elites" want a lot of silly things, and we're far more likely to describe elite-preferred things that diverge from median-voter-preferred things in those kinds of terms when those things are particularly silly. But the median voter wants a lot of silly things too - we could (nay, should! must!) equivalently talk about the perils of undue deference to the hooples. Can we really be sure we don't do harm by strengthening the already strong ties between voter preferences and policy outcomes? Mightn't there be some optimal level of elitism? Or structures - like the ones we have now - that allow for elite veto of particularly pernicious populist policy?

Urban Economics: student bleg

Good news! Auckland Council is sponsoring a scholarship in urban economics. It's open to postgraduate students in urban economics or related fields.

Kiwis finishing up their undergraduate Economics degrees and interested in doing a Masters in Economics at Canterbury should get in touch with me: I'd be interested in supervising a thesis looking at local urban planning issues around Auckland. Blog readers know the kinds of urban topics I like; if you want me as supervisor, drop me a note, but read the caveat below.

The closing deadline for scholarship applications is 30 May.

The Economics Department here at Canterbury is currently undergoing a redundancy process; I should know whether or not I will continue to be here prior to the closing date for applications. Updates will be provided when uncertainty is resolved: I am definitely not going to take on any new graduate supervision unless uncertainty is resolved favourably. But we expect resolution on or about 20 May.

Pre-quake, we were a Department of 19.6 full-time equivalent academic staff, including 2 Teaching Fellows. Subsequent to post-quake departures and encouraged early retirements, we are a Department of 12.6 full-time equivalent academic staff, including 2 Teaching Fellows. Subsequent to the forthcoming change proposal, should all go as currently proposed, we will be a Department of 9.6 full-time equivalent academic staff, including 2 Teaching Fellows.

Interesting times. Navigating these waters has taken much of my time lately; apologies for the light blogging.

Increasing alcohol excise is great, if you assume the right things

Imagine that hazardous drinkers really really cared about the price of alcohol. If you increased the price of alcohol just a little bit, they'd stop drinking harmfully. Imagine further that moderate drinkers didn't respond very much to prices: what does it matter to the rich Chardonnay-sipping set if a bottle is $8 or $40? If that were the true state of the world, we would have a very simple solution to alcohol problems: hike excise taxes. Harmful drinkers would stop drinking and would stop doing alcohol-related harmful things; moderate drinkers would pay more but that would just be tax revenue for the government. Since they wouldn't change their consumption by very much, deadweight costs would be pretty small relative to the harms avoided. Yay taxes!

Unfortunately, the world don't quite look like that. Our best evidence on it remains Wagenaar's metastudy showing that heavy drinkers respond to a 10% price hike by reducing consumption by 2.8%; average consumption drops by 4.4% with the same price increase. Moderate drinkers respond more to price increases than do heavy drinkers.

Even worse, Byrnes et al show that heavy drinkers' price responsiveness mostly comes from their reductions in drinking on low-drinking days: they basically save up to be able to continue binging on the weekend. So their reduction in consumption is in the part of their consumption that does the least harm. Boo taxes!

Enter the NZ Government report on excise and minimum pricing. Fortunately, the Minister has more sense than her Ministry and hasn't gone ahead with minimum pricing; hopefully, she's not looking at excise. What's the problem with the report? They started by assuming that heavy drinkers are more responsive to prices than are moderate drinkers.

And they know it's wrong. Here, at Table 5, they show the general consensus of the international literature: heavy drinkers don't respond to prices nearly as strongly as do moderate drinkers.

The Wagenaar numbers vary a bit from the -0.44 that I tend to cite as average; I usually go for the weighted measure. Bottom line: heavy drinkers are roughly half as responsive to prices as are moderate drinkers. That's page 20. And they cite Byrnes accurately at page 21.

But then what do they go and do? They started by trying to get SHORE to estimate NZ elasticities, but something went wrong there: the elasticities were completely out of whack with reality. Reading between the lines at page 25, it looks like SHORE was using the increase in purchases of products on special at supermarkets as part of its price elasticity estimation, and that just ain't right. If you switch brands because something's on special and buy more of it than you otherwise would have, that isn't the same effect as you'd expect for across-the-board price changes you get with excise or minimum pricing.

As the report rather bluntly puts it:

"It was decided that the significant reductions in consumption estimated using NZ elasticity estimates are not a realistic representation of what is likely to happen in reality and are contrary to all international evidence of the responsiveness of alcohol consumers to changes in price."

Rather than discard the completely nuts NZ numbers, they let those figures stand and added alternative numbers as robustness checks. Those big headline estimates you've been seeing in the papers about just how awesome excise is? They're based on the numbers that, according to the report, "are not a realistic representation in reality and are contrary to all international evidence of the responsiveness of alcohol consumers to changes in price."

Example? A 133% excise hike means about a 40% increase in the cost of low-priced beer, a 44% increase in the cost of low-priced wine, a 45% increase in the cost of low-priced RTDs, and a 103% increase in the price of low-cost spirits. The heavy drinkers SHORE estimated a 61% reduction in harmful consumers' consumption with that tax hike. So they're saying that harmful consumers are more than unit elastic. That's just not right.

The other problem with the SHORE numbers is that they couldn't distinguish between heavy and moderate drinkers. Everybody's elasticity was equally overestimated.

Because those numbers were so out of whack, they also ported in some Sheffield elasticity estimates from the UK. Problem with those estimates is that, while they're about right on average, they've messed up the relative elasticities: they have harmful drinkers being more price responsive than moderate drinkers. I'm not sure why they didn't pull in the 2008 Sheffield estimates noted at Table 5. At Table 25 they say, using Sheffield, that a 133% excise increase would reduce low risk consumption by 18.6% while reducing harmful consumption by 21%. If that 133% excise increase corresponds to about a 45% price increase, then Wagenaar's estimates would say we'd get only a 12.6% decrease in heavy consumption and a 28% decrease in moderate drinkers' consumption (using the figures from Table 5). Heavy drinkers' real-world price responsiveness is 60% of that advertised, while moderate drinkers' responsiveness is 150% of their figures.

Now, why does this matter? The more responsive are moderate drinkers to price measures as compared to heavy drinkers, the more expensive is any bit of harm reduction in terms of harms imposed on moderate drinkers. And the folks who wrote the report know this matters too! Here's what they wrote at page 85:

Overall it appears that excise increases have a greater impact on harmful drinkers than low risk drinkers, based on University of Sheffield elasticity estimates. This is driven by the greater own-price elasticities, particularly for spirits. However, this result is inconsistent with findings in studies such as Wagenaar et al (2009), which found that heavy drinkers are much less responsive to price changes (with an elasticity of -0.28 compared to -0.62 for all drinkers). The University of Sheffield also found that harmful drinkers are much more price inelastic compared to low risk drinkers when total alcohol consumption was considered, rather than consumption by beverage type.

We also do not have separate elasticities for per occasion drinking, and recent evidence indicates that people are much less price responsive during drinking occasions (Byrnes et al, 2012). Therefore there is a risk that the effects on purchases could have been over-estimated for per occasion purchases. 

Therefore we cannot conclude with confidence that excise increases will have a greater impact on harmful drinkers. More research is needed to confirm this, which could be done once revised University of Sheffield elasticity estimates are available.

Here are but a few of the the ways this will affect their analysis:

• Crime reduction benefits are overestimated both because heavy drinkers are modelled as being far more price responsive than they really are and because crime seems more responsive to binge drinking than to longer term heavy drinking, and it's the latter that seems more affected than the former among heavy drinkers. 
• The health effects will be overestimated where harmful drinkers are modelled as sharply curtailing consumption and where we underestimate by how much moderate drinkers shift into non-drinking and miss out on the health benefits of moderate drinking.
• The deadweight costs facing moderate consumers are underestimated in the Sheffield figures that understate moderate drinkers' consumption elasticity.
• All the other benefits that require consumption reductions among heavy drinkers will also be overstated.

Tables 40 and 41 have a whole whack of sensitivity checks. What if population growth is lower or higher? What if we use a higher or lower discount rate? Nowhere in the 21 sensitivity analyses is the one that really matters: "What if we use a sane, international-consensus measure of relative price elasticities?"

Whether this is enough to overturn their net benefits finding - I can't tell without a pretty extensive bit of work. Just linear extrapolations from the changes in harmful and moderate consumption won't do it: deadweight costs will increase extraproportionately, and harms are likely exponential in heavy consumption.* But I'm pretty sure that Collins was dead right in not relying on this stuff to justify imposing minimum pricing: the case hasn't been made. 

A few other potential problems on a cursory reading:

• They estimate the productivity costs of those showing up to work with hangovers under the assumption that those prone to showing up to work with hangovers have average productivity characteristics but for their propensity to show up for work with hangovers. I rather suspect that less conscientious workers are more prone to showing up unfit for duty, and that this affects more than just hangovers.
• They estimate the productivity costs of taking a day off for a hangover under the assumption that the kinds of people who take a sickie for a hangover wouldn't have used up that free sick day for some other recreational purpose later in the year. This also seems implausible. 
• Their analysis of alcohol-related unemployment is bereft of consideration of comorbidity between alcoholism and depression and the independent effect of underlying characteristics on employment.
• Frictional costs to employers of replacing fired or deceased workers seem predicated on an assumption that the employer would never otherwise have to have replaced that worker.
• Their crime estimates count as an alcohol-caused crime any crime committed by someone arrested within 12 hours of offending and presenting as at least moderately intoxicated. While this may underestimate things by excluding those who aren't caught until much later, it also says that every one of those moderately intoxicated arrestees would never have committed the offence but for the alcohol. Not sure which way things will cut on that one, but I'm awfully sure that they'd do better by just porting in some decent estimates of the elasticity of crime with respect to alcohol out of something like Carpenter. 

I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they have a second go at this, with some sane elasticity figures. 

On the plus side, Footnote 31 points to my blog post on likely effects of minimum prices on producers. I'd have recommended this one instead.

* At Table 37, they give a $268,185,000 cost of a 133% excise hike. If moderate consumers are 150% as responsive as they're reckoning, then a linearisation would put that cost up to $402 million. At Table 30, they give a value of harm reduction in Year 1 of $740,344,000. If heavy consumers are only 60% as price responsive as they're reckoning and if harms were linear, that knocks the benefits down to $444m. So we're down to a net benefit of about $40 million, without considering that deadweight costs will be higher than implied by linearisation, and without considering the other problems noted above. Whether the linearisation on harms here overstates or understates things gets complicated: for any individual drinker, harms are strongly non-linear, so if we had a pile of really really heavy drinkers estimated to become moderate drinkers, but instead only become heavy drinkers, then my linearisation overestimates how much the report overstates harm reduction: the reduction in harm in moving from really really heavy drinking to heavy drinking is bigger than the reduction in harm from moving from heavy to moderate drinking. But if instead we get the harm reduction from greater proportions of heavy drinkers shifting into moderate drinkers than really would, then the linearisation would be about right. And if prices are really bad at hitting acute drinking that contributes most greatly to harms, then even my linearisation understates the extent to which the report overstates harm reduction. It's complicated, and I haven't access to the guts of this machine. 

On Stillman SHOREs

So, did reducing NZ's alcohol purchase age really hike youth accident rates? SHORE says so:

Now, in the first long-term study, Massey University researchers Dr Taisia Huckle and Karl Parker have found this increased risk has become the new normal.

In the years leading up to the change, drivers aged 18 or 19 had roughly the same chances as those aged 20 to 24 of having an "alcohol-involved" vehicle crash that caused injury or death.

That increased in the years following the change, putting the younger drivers at 15 per cent greater risk in the first six years, then at 21 per cent greater risk up to 2010.

Loyal readers will recall Steve Stillman's work with Stefan Boes showing the opposite: they concluded that there was no increase in crash risk for 18 and 19 year olds after the purchase age change.

So why the difference?

First, the two studies are looking at different things. Huckle et al at SHORE use the ratio of alcohol-involved to non-alcohol crashes as dependent variable. They argue that this helps to control for the rate of non-alcohol-related crashes. They look at how this ratio for 18-19 year olds changes as compared to the similar ratio for older cohorts after the crash. If the ratio increases, that's potentially a form of difference-in-difference analysis that says something about the effects of the law change. They found that the ratio increased for youths relative to older cohorts.

Stillman and Boes instead looked at the number of alcohol-related crashes among 18-19 year olds as compared to alcohol-related crashes among older cohorts. They found no increase in the number of alcohol-related crashes for youths relative to adults once you put in appropriate time trends.

One problem with using ratios as dependent variable, and especially when you're using it in difference-in-difference comparison to another ratio, is that you can't easily tell whether any significant effect of the intervention was due to changes in alcohol-related youth accidents, non-alcohol-related youth accidents, alcohol-related adult accidents, or non-alcohol-related adult accidents. If non-alcohol-related accidents changed for other reasons around the time of the policy change, and if youths responded to that differently than adults, then that could have driven results.

Because the ratio measure isn't clean, it's then harder to talk about the "risk" of an alcohol-involved crash for youths subsequent to the change. You could say that the ratio has changed, but it's hard to say why. Stillman's paper pretty clearly shows that the "why" wasn't an increase in alcohol-involved accidents among 18-19 year olds.

Further, and as Thomas Lumley points out, while the paper says there was no effect on fatalities, each tragic anecdote in the Herald piece involved a fatality; the Herald story nowhere mentioned that SHORE found nothing on fatalities. The SHORE paper said "Lowering the purchase age had no impact on fatal alcohol-involved crashes among drivers aged 18 to 19 years compared with drivers aged 20 to 24 years." I'm a bit curious why the Herald then chose to lead with "Lowering the alcohol purchase age has been linked to a long-term increase in the chance of drunk drivers aged 18 or 19 being involved in car crashes that cause death or injury."