& LABOR LEARNING ECONOMICS APRIL 26 28, 100 YEARS OF ECONOMICS MAJORS AT OBERLIN

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1 APRIL 26 28, YEARS OF ECONOMICS MAJORS AT OBERLIN LEARNING & LABOR ECONOMICS A conference honoring Albert Rees 43 and 100 years of economics majors at Oberlin College Keynote Speaker: Alan B. Krueger, Chair, President s Council of Economic Advisors For more information, visit:

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3 LEARNING 100 YEARS OF ECONOMICS MAJORS AT OBERLIN Event Schedule FRIDAY, APRIL 26 & LABOR ECONOMICS 6:00 p.m. Reception & Dinner (invitation only) with President Marvin Krislov peters hall 8:00 p.m. Keynote Speech The Labor Market and Education: The Policy Agenda Presenter: Alan Krueger science center, norman c. craig lecture hall 8:30 p.m. Panel Current Labor Market Conditions Panelists: Dixie Sommers 70, Lisa Barrow, and Wayne Vroman science center, norman c. craig lecture hall continued

4 SATURDAY, APRIL 27 daytime events held in the adam joseph lewis center for environmental studies 8:00 8:45 a.m. Continental Breakfast 9:00 11:00 a.m. Session I Moderator: Daniel Rees 86 Is the Golden Age of the Private University Over? Presenter: Ronald Ehrenberg Discussant: Joshua Rosenbloom 81 Jobs and the Small Business Administration: Estimating the Employment Effects of Loan Programs using Universal Panel Data Presenter: John Earle 80 Discussant: Christopher Rohlfs 00 11:00 11:15 a.m. Coffee Break 11:15 a.m. noon Session II Introduction: Joshua Angrist 82 Real Wage Comparisons? Presenter: Orley Ashenfelter 12:15 1:15 p.m. Lunch 1:15 3:15 p.m. Session III Moderator: Frank Sloan 64 Stand and Deliver: Long-Term Outcomes at Boston s Charter High Schools Presenter: Joshua Angrist 82 Discussant: Tobias Pfutze Performance Pay and Worker Intrinsic Motivation: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment Presenter: David Huffman 96 Discussant: Fabian Lange

5 3:15 3:30 p.m. Coffee Break 3:30 5:30 p.m. Session IV Moderator: Richard Steckel 66 The Black-White Test Score Gap from Kindergarten to 7th Grade: The Fragility of Results and an Imperfect Solution Presenter: Kevin Lang Discussant: Darrick Hamilton 93 Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes Presenter: David Newhouse 95 Discussant: Nzinga Broussard 02 6:30 9:30 p.m. Reception and Dinner (invitation only) Music: Jazz Student Combo, John Earle 80 and Brea Warner 14 carnegie building, root room SUNDAY, APRIL 28 8:00 a.m. noon Brunch (invitation only) Culinary Vegetable Institute, Milan, Ohio Bus transportation provided from Oberlin

6 BIOGRAPHIES Albert Rees Trustee Albert Rees was an internationally known labor economist with a rich and varied career who served as president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and provost of Princeton University. He took leaves to serve the government in various research and administrative positions, including the President s Council of Economic Advisers and the Council on Wage and Price Stability. His analytical approach to understanding labor markets and the behavior of its participants led economists to wiser and more thoughtful insights and away from mere description. Much of his research must be regarded as groundbreaking, and hundreds of young economists followed in his path. Born in New York in 1921, Rees graduated from Oberlin in 1943 and earned master s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. He remained at Chicago, serving as department chair from 1962 to 1966 and taking academic leaves to serve at the Council of Economic Advisers and the Committee to Appraise Employment and Unemployment Statistics. In 1966, he joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he held various positions, including chair of the economics department and the Class of 1913 Professorship in Political Economy. There, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on price theory and labor economics. He was often called upon to serve on advisory committees for the federal government and the state of New Jersey. His subsequent appointment to provost of Princeton while William G. Bowen, another labor economist, was president did not lessen his intellectual interest in issues concerning labor markets.

7 Rees, with George P. Shultz, who later became US. Secretary of State, wrote the 1970 landmark study on the Chicago labor market, one of the first such research projects that collected and analyzed current data on wages and employment conditions of individual workers. Their research led to the important book Workers and Wages in an Urban Labor Market, which appropriately received high praise by reviewers including, incidentally, Oberlin s Hirschel Kasper. In 1974 Rees was appointed by President Gerald Ford to lead the newly established Council on Wage and Price Stability to monitor the nation s then unusually rapid rate of inflation and alert the government and the public to the various sources of inflationary pressures, especially for household goods, such as food, and services. In 1979 he was named president of the Sloan Foundation, which, at the time held about $250 million in assets from which it awarded $15 million in grants each year. Rees was appreciative of the Public Service Studies Program at Oberlin and alerted the foundation to the program s achievements. He retired from that presidency in 1989 and returned to Princeton as a senior research economist. In addition to scores of research and policy-oriented articles, Rees wrote the classics Real Wages in Manufacturing, , published in 1961, and The Economics of Trade Unions (1962), as well as the more reflective Striking a Balance: Making National Economic Policy, published in At Oberlin, the Albert Rees Research and Policy Fellowships, initiated by William Bowen, have enabled faculty members and students to pursue research that would otherwise be beyond their means. The Rees Policy Fellowship enables students to hold internships at the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington at a time when the council prepares the annual Economic Report of the President.

8 Alan B. Krueger Council of Economic Advisers Conference Keynote Speaker Alan Krueger is chair of President Barack Obama s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the cabinet. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 3, Previously, he served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Krueger is currently on leave from Princeton University, where he is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He has held a joint appointment in the economics department and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton since In , Krueger served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. A labor economist, Krueger has published widely on unemployment, the economics of education, income distribution, social insurance, regulation, terrorism, finance, and the environment. Prior to assuming his current position, Krueger was a member of the board of directors of the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at Charles University in the Czech Republic, and a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization. He also has been a research associate of the

9 National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the editorial board of Science, and has served as chief economist for the Council for Economic Education. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Economics in 1992 and an NBER Olin Fellow in He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996, a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2005, and a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association in He was awarded the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1997 and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal by the Indian Econometric Society in In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics with David Card in From March 2000 to February 2009, he was a regular contributor to the Economic Scene and Economix blog in the New York Times. Krueger received a BS with honors at Cornell University s School of Industrial & Labor Relations in 1983, an MA in economics at Harvard University in 1985, and a PhD in economics at Harvard University in 1987.

10 Joshua Angrist 82 MIT Joshua Angrist is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and a research associate in National Bureau of Economic Research programs on children, education, and labor studies. A dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before arriving at MIT. Angrist received his BA at Oberlin. He spent time as an undergraduate studying at the London School of Economics and as a master s student at Hebrew University. He completed his PhD in economics at Princeton in 1989 and served his first academic post there as assistant professor from 1989 to Angrist s research interests include the effects of school inputs and school organization on student achievement; the impact of education and social programs on the labor market; the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions; and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation. Angrist is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Econometric Society, and he has served on many editorial boards and as coeditor of the Journal of Labor Economics. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) in 2007 and is the author (with Steve Pischke) of Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist s Companion (Princeton University Press, 2009).

11 Orley Ashenfelter Princeton University Orley Ashenfelter is the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics and director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. He is the editor of the Law and Economics Review, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Ashenfelter won the IZA Labor Economics Prize in 2003 and received a doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Brussels in He was editor of the American Economic Review, the world s largest peer-reviewed economics journal, from 1985 to As director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor in 1972, Ashenfelter began work that is now widely recognized as the separate field of quantitative social program evaluation. He is also regarded as the originator of the use of so-called natural experiments to infer causality about economic relationships. He has also led the very recent emphasis in quantitative economic analysis on the use of creative methods of data collection. His innovative research has spanned a broad array of topics in the economic analysis of labor markets. Ashenfelter has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol.

12 Lisa Barrow Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Lisa Barrow is a senior economist in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Barrow conducts research on issues in education, public finance and labor economics. She is on leave from April 2011 until April Barrow s current work includes a project evaluating the impacts of closing persistently failing schools on the outcomes of Chicago Public School students and a collaborative project with MDRC evaluating performance-based scholarships at the community college level. Her research on school choice, education production and the earned income tax credit has appeared in numerous journals including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Annual Review of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, The Future of Children and Economic Perspectives, the Chicago Fed s quarterly research publication. Since joining the Chicago Fed in 1998, Barrow has also been a visiting assistant professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and a visiting lecturer at the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Chicago Fed, she was a lecturer at Princeton University s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Barrow received a B.A. in economics from Carleton College and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Princeton University.

13 Nzinga H. Broussard 02 Ohio State University Nzinga Broussard is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Ohio State University. Her research interests are in development and labor economics. She is an applied micro-economist who examines individual and household decision-making in developing countries, primarily in Sub-Sahara Africa. Her research projects have explored the dynamics of poverty and the role of social safety nets in helping households escape poverty in rural Ethiopia. She is currently investigating the effects of international immigration on the labor markets in developing countries. And while her research tends to be diverse, it addresses important problems faced by individuals and households in poor countries.

14 John S. Earle 80 George Mason University John Earle joined the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in 2010, following nearly two decades teaching at Central European University in Budapest. He taught also at Stanford University, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Vienna. Earle s research focuses on the firm-level and worker-level effects of public policies, particularly under conditions of structural and institutional change, and he has written widely on labor markets, political economy, firm performance, privatization and corporate governance, entrepreneurship, industry dynamics, organizational practices, and the consequences of restructuring for employees. His approach is comparative, institutional, and interdisciplinary, and much of his work develops and analyzes large micro-databases for multiple economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Earle holds a bachelor s degree from Oberlin and an MA and PhD from Stanford and currently serve as president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies. He has published four books and numerous chapters in edited volumes, as well as articles and reports for policymakers and broader audiences. His policy experience includes stints at the Council of Economic Advisers, the Congressional Budget Office, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

15 Ronald G. Ehrenberg Cornell University Ronald Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. He also is director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. From 1995 to 1998 he served as Cornell s vice president for academic programs, planning, and budgeting. Ehrenberg was the founding editor of Research in Labor Economics and served a 10-year term as co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources. He has served on several editorial boards and as a consultant to numerous governmental agencies and commissions and university and private research corporations. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at IZA (Berlin), was a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association, chaired the AAUP Committees on Retirement and the Economic Status of the Profession, and is past president of the Society of Labor Economists. He served as an elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees from 2006 to 2010 and currently serves on the SUNY Board of Trustees. He holds a BA in mathematics from Harpur College, an MA and PhD in economics from Northwestern University, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from SUNY in 2008, and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Penn State University in A member of the Cornell faculty for 36 years, he has authored or co-authored over 150 papers and authored or edited 26 books. In 2011, The Society of Labor Economists presented him with the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics.

16 Darrick Hamilton 93 The New School Darrick Hamilton is an associate professor of economics and urban policy at The New School, an affiliate scholar at the Center for American Progress, and a research affiliate at the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina. Hamilton is a stratification economist whose work focuses on the causes, consequences, and remedies of racial and ethnic inequality in economic and health outcomes, which includes an examination of the intersection of identity, racism, colorism, and socioeconomic outcomes. He has published articles on disparities in wealth, homeownership, health, and labor market outcomes. Finally, his research agenda has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

17 David Huffman 96 Swarthmore College David Huffman is an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and associate editor of Management Science. Most of his research lies at the intersection of three fields: behavioral economics, experimental economics, and labor economics. Specific research interests include the impact of loss aversion on labor supply; conflict and cooperation between social groups; measurement of individual preferences including risk, time, and social preference; the role of self-confidence in search processes; the political acceptability of workfare; and the role of emotion in decision making. Huffman joined the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, as a research associate in 2003 and continues to be affiliated with IZA as a research fellow. He earned his PhD at Berkeley in 2003.

18 Fabian Lange McGill University Fabian Lange is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at McGill University. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and served as an assistant and associate professor at Yale. In the field of population economics, Fabian has published works on the trade-offs between increased fertility and education using data sources from the historical American South. In health economics, he studies the determinants of the socioeconomic gradient in health, asking what role information processing, cognitive ability, and education play in generating socio-economic gradients in health. In labor economics, Lange s research concerns how workers careers are shaped by processes of information revelation, in particular the role of employer learning in generating earnings inequality as individuals age. Lange received the H. G. Lewis prize 2008 and the IZA Young Labor Economist Award for his work in this area.

19 Kevin Lang Boston University Kevin Lang is a professor of economics at Boston University and an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He served as a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London), a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn), and a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University). He holds a PhD in economics from MIT. Lang s research focuses on the economics of labor markets and education, including such topics as discrimination, unemployment, the relation between education and earnings, and the relation between housing prices, taxes, and local services. The author of two books and numerous book chapters and articles, he currently serves as a co-editor of Labour Economics, the Journal of the European Association of Labor Economists. He spent three months at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research on a Fulbright Fellowship and was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship.

20 David Newhouse 95 World Bank David Newhouse joined the World Bank s Social Protection unit as a labor economist in November He first joined the World Bank in August 2007, based in Jakarta, and co-led the Indonesian Jobs Report. Prior to that, he worked for three years as a consultant in the Poverty and Social Impact Analysis unit of the IMF, and for two years in the consumer protection division of the Federal Trade Commission. Newhouse holds a PhD from Cornell University and has published several peer-reviewed articles on diverse topics in labor economics, the economics of education, and health economics. Tobias Pfutze Oberlin College Tobias Pfutze joined the economics department at Oberlin in 2009 after a year as visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from New York University. With an interest in development economics and political economy, Pfutze is studying the effects of migration on sending countries as well as the emergence/ persistence of democratic institutions. He has also done work on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Recent publications include Does Migration Promote Democratization? Evidence from the Mexican Transition in the Journal of Comparative Economics, The Political Consequences of International Migration on Sending Countries in International Affairs Forum, and The Importance of Aid Fragmentation in Sub- Saharan Africa in International Affairs Forum.

21 Daniel Rees 86 University of Colorado, Denver Daniel Rees is a professor of economics at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he specializes in health economics and labor economics. He is interested in the effects of health and health behaviors on human capital acquisition. Working with Joseph Sabia at the U.S. Military Academy, he has explored the effects of obesity, migraine headaches, and sexual activity on a wide variety of outcomes, including grades, high school graduation, and college attendance. He is also studying the effects of health and health behaviors on labor market success. Rees holds a PhD in labor economics from Cornell University.

22 Chris Rohlfs 00 Syracuse University Chris Rohlfs is an assistant professor of economics at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and a senior research associate at Maxwell s Center for Policy Research. An applied microeconomist who specializes in national defense and cost-benefit analysis, he studies the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of policies aimed at reducing fatality risk for specific groups of people. He is also interested in using revealed preference methods to measure the economic benefits of publicly provided rights and amenities such as improvements in safety, freedom from jail or conscription, U.S. citizenship, and class-size reductions. Recent and forthcoming publications include Optimal Bail and the Value of Freedom: Evidence from the Philadelphia Bail Experiment in Economic Inquiry and The Role of Specific Subjects in Education Production Functions: Evidence From Morning Classes in Chicago Public High Schools in the Berkeley Electronic Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. Rohlfs holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.

23 Joshua L. Rosenbloom 81 University of Kansas National Bureau of Economic Research Joshua Rosenbloom, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas, teaches courses on the economic history of the United States and Europe, the economics of technological change, and the economics of the labor market. Research interests include U.S. economic history, labor economics, and the economics of science and technology. His active projects include collaborative work with Thomas Weiss and Peter C. Mancall on the rate of economic growth in North America before 1800, and a study of the impact of federal funding on the productivity of academic chemists. Rosenbloom has written about the development of U.S. labor markets during industrialization, the underrepresentation of women in information technology, and the impact of child-bearing on women s labor force participation.

24 Dixie Sommers 70 Assistant Commissioner for Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections, Bureau of Labor Statistics Dixie Sommers is Assistant Commissioner for Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections, Bureau of Labor Statistics. She is responsible for the Occupational Employment Statistics and Employment Projections programs, providing information on employment and wages by occupation for the nation, States and metropolitan areas, and national job outlook for industries and occupations. The results are widely used by businesses, educators, workforce development program policy makers and service providers, and adults and youth who are exploring career choices. She served as labor market information director and deputy administrator of the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services, and as senior research associate at Ohio State University s Center for Human Resource Research. Ms. Sommers chaired the Advisory Panel on the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The Advisory Panel s recommendations led to the establishment of O*NET. She holds a degree in economics from Oberlin College and master in labor and human resources from Ohio State University.

25 Frank Sloan 64 Duke University Frank Sloan is the J. Alexander McMahon Professor of Health Policy and Management and professor of economics at Duke University. The former director of the Center for Health Policy, Law and Management at Duke, he holds faculty appointments in five departments, with economics being his primary. He received his PhD in economics at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Duke in 1993, Sloan was a research economist at the Rand Corporation and served on the faculties of the University of Florida and Vanderbilt University. He was chair of the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt from 1986 to His current research interests include alcohol use and smoking prevention, long-term care, medical malpractice, and cost-effectiveness analyses of medical technologies. He also has a long-standing interest in hospitals, including regulation of hospitals, health care financing, and health manpower. Sloan has served on several national advisory public and private groups. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and was formally a member of the Physician Payment Review Commission. He is the author of about 300 journal articles and book chapters and has coauthored and coedited about 20 books. Recently published books are Medical Malpractice (MIT Press, 2008, coauthored with L. Chepke) and Incentives and Choice in Health Care (MIT Press, 2008, co-edited with H. Kasper).

26 Richard Steckel 66 Ohio State University A Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Economics at Ohio State University, Richard Steckel specializes in measuring and analyzing long-term trends in the standard of living using diverse sources and methodologies, including heights and skeletal remains. He is a pioneer in the field of anthropometric history, which uses stature and other anthropometric measures to assess health and nutrition in the past. His current work in this area considers the case of American slaves, who were extraordinarily short as children (below the first percentile of modern height standards) but recovered as teenagers to the 20th percentile as young adults. His project measures the extent to which nutritional deprivation in early childhood imposed cognitive deficits that compromised earning and wealth accumulation on the generations born in slavery. Steckel gives frequent talks at professional meetings and at universities around the country and abroad. He serves on a review panel of the National Institutes of Health and has been president of the Economic History Association and the Social Science History Association. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.

27 Wayne Vroman Urban Institute Wayne Vroman has conducted wide-ranging research on unemployment compensation and insurance programs. Committed to assisting with the development of unemployment insurance systems, Vroman has provided significant technical assistance on funding to states and also to foreign countries. Vroman has served as a key proponent for strategies and programs working to sustain and strengthen unemployment insurance programs. His research focuses extensively on the effects of unemployment compensation on state and worldwide levels. He is also one of the founding members of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Before his time at the Urban Institute, Vroman held positions in the Economics Departments at Oberlin College and the University of Maryland. Vroman received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

28 This conference was sponsored by the Department of Economics at Oberlin College. Generous support was provided by our kind alumni and College officers. DanforthSpeakersFund Kasper Fund Kutzen Fund Mullenbach Fund Saul Nelson Fund Lewis Peirce Fund Albert Rees Fund Smith Fund Steckel Fund