Work in Progress
Behavioral Incentive Compatibility of BDM Belief Elicitation
[Slides]
Recent evidence has shown that revealing incentives during belief elicitation might negatively impact truth telling, even if the elicitation mechanism is theoretically incentive compatible. In this project, I study the effect of quantitative incentive information on truth telling in the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) belief elicitation mechanism. Subjects guess the probability of selecting a red urn out of 10 urns of colors red and blue, where the number of urns of each color is known. Results show that in the treatment where subjects are shown full quantitative incentives, the rate of false reports is around 10 percentage points higher than in the treatment where no quantitative incentives are shown. This higher rate of false reports is driven by subjects who misunderstood the incentives. Given that BDM belief elicitation is particularly difficult to explain and implement, this result shows a potentially simpler and more practical way of eliciting beliefs while maintaining quality of data.
Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Long-Run Outcomes of US-Born Students
(with Briana Ballis and Derek Rury)
Awarded the Russell Sage Foundation Research Grant for the Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Program in March 2023.
We use Texas A&M Geoservices Services for our geocoding.
Working Papers
Do Schools Matter? Measuring the Impact of California High Schools on Test Scores and Postsecondary Enrollment
(with Scott Carrell, Michal Kurlaender, Paco Martorell, and Matthew Naven)
Using a longitudinal panel of students’ standardized test scores and college enrollment records in California, we estimate high school impacts on test score performance, post-secondary enrollment, and the relationship between the two. We estimate two measures of school quality – a base model measuring each school’s “total” contribution to student outcomes and a second measure which isolates the “malleable” component of school quality accounting for peer, neighborhood, and family quality. Results show substantial variation across schools in both test scores and college enrollment. A one-standard deviation increase in total school quality is associated with a 0.15 standard deviation increase in standardized test scores and a 9.9 percentage point increase in four-year college enrollment. Though, these impacts shrink considerably (0.10 s.d. & 4.8 ppts) when isolating the malleable component of school quality. Importantly, our results show that test score impacts “persist” to college enrollment. Higher test score value-added schools increase college enrollment across multiple margins – lower ability students move from no college to two-year colleges while higher ability students move from two-year to four-year colleges.