Search Results for “job market” – Page 20

Published May 7, 2012

Implementation Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials

From a new paper (link opens a .pdf file) by Oxford’s Tessa Bold and her coauthors:

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity and the neglect of political economy. We investigate these concerns in a randomized trial designed to assess the prospects for scaling-up a contract teacher intervention in Kenya, previously shown to raise test scores for primary students in Western Kenya and various locations in India. The intervention was implemented in parallel in all eight Kenyan provinces by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and the Kenyan government. Institutional differences had large effects on contract teacher performance. We find a significant, positive effect of 0.19 standard deviations on math and English scores in schools randomly assigned to NGO implementation, and zero effect in schools receiving contract teachers from the Ministry of Education. We discuss political economy factors underlying this disparity, and suggest the need for future work on scaling up proven interventions to work within public sector institutions.

Bold et al.’s finding points to an important problem with the findings of many randomized controlled trials (RCTs): No matter how careful one is in ensuring that subjects are randomly assigned to the treatment and control groups, almost all RCTs rely on only one implementing partner.

Published October 13, 2011

The Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now

Earlier this week, I discussed signalling, both in the context of the recent trend toward “admitting failure” in development policy and in the context of corporate social responsibility in the business world. Wikipedia describes signalling as

The idea that one party (termed the agent) credibly conveys some information about itself to another party (the principal). For example, in Michael Spence’s job-market signalling model, (potential) employees send a signal about their ability level to the employer by acquiring certain education credentials. The informational value of the credential comes from the fact that the employer assumes it is positively correlated with having greater ability.

Not only that — the agent also has to incur a real cost in order to send the signal, otherwise the signal is simply not credible. Moreover, sending the signal need not involve any productive aim other than signalling. The classic example of signalling among economists is getting an MBA, which is costly both in terms of tuition and forgone wages.

So much for the costliness of getting an MBA. How productive is getting an MBA? Michael Ryall, who teaches at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and who guest-blogs over at orgtheory.net, has written a few excellent posts on how the content of an MBA education has changed in 30 years. Here is a good excerpt from his latest post:

Published July 7, 2011

A Cautionary Tale About Working Papers

My Texas A&M colleague Kim Yi Dionne posted last week about the Bulletin of the World Health Organization‘s (BullWHO) decision to rescind its acceptance of one of her papers after the BullWHO editor realized that the paper had previously been posted online as part of a working paper series:

“About a week after the acceptance, however, I got this email:

Dear Dr Dionne,

In the course of editing the paper that was reently (sic) accepted for publication in our journal, we found an essentially identical working paper describing the same study on the website of the University of California in Los Angeles.

http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-CCPR-2009-046/PWP-CCPR-2009-046.pdf

Because this constitues a case of duplicate publication, we now have no choice but to reverse our decision to accept your paper for publication.

It turns out my co-author had submitted a previous working draft of the paper to her center for posting on their working papers site.”

This is awful. I can only imagine what it’s like to get told that an acceptance is rescinded after going through all the work necessary to get a paper published. This would be especially awful in certain cases in economics, where the time from inception to publication is measured in years. For example, I began working on my job-market paper in the summer of 2002; I collected the survey data for it in 2004; I presented it in seminars in 2006-2007; it was finally accepted by Land Economics in early 2011; and it’ll be published in early 2012. In other words, it took almost ten years from inception to publication!

I am not sure I have a coherent position on the working paper culture. If you are interested in that, Berk Özler makes an excellent case for why the working paper culture is not working in a post on the Development Impacts blog.

But if there is a lesson to be learned from Kim’s woes, it is this one: Know your intended outlets.

I have often heard it said that you should just write the best research paper possible and then choose where to submit. But for me, two things militate against that “write now, choose journal later” position. First is the fact that if you know who your intended audience is, your writing will be a lot more focused, with the end result that it will be much more pleasing to your intended audience than a piece intended for just any audience. Second is the fact that it minimizes the scope for stories like the one told above. This is especially true when dealing with outlets that are closer to the “hard” sciences (such as public health journals) than they are to the social sciences.

64 search results for "job market"

Implementation Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials

The Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now

A Cautionary Tale About Working Papers