Month: September 2015

On the Road Again

It’s hard to believe that almost 16 months have passed since I moved out of Easton and to Boston. Since then, I’ve visited eight countries (including four new ones!) and eleven states (it’s so easy when they’re so close together!!!), managed the completion of one very large research project undertaken by seven very busy economists, attended five conferences, submitted three papers, got buried in four snowstorms, and met countless fantastic people.

If this sounds to you like a here-we-go-again, set-back-to-zero post, you would be correct. At the end of September, I am moving out of my totally awesome (but always boiling) apartment in Porter Square in Cambridge and driving, slowly, back to Colorado.

I’m hoping to hit a few big cities along the way to see friends. My farewell East Coast tour, as it were, and just kind of enjoy the drive back. I haven’t driven across country in over a decade, so I’m actually looking forward to it.

Back to Colorado! Everyone I tell this plan to who is from Colorado or has lived there expresses their jealousy, but then the questions set in. What are you going to do? Why are you leaving? What ski pass are you getting? Everyone in Boston (or nearly everyone, I guess) tells me they are sad to see me go, but you can see the glint in their eyes: planning our next vacation, are we? (You are totally welcome anytime!)

I imagine you have more questions, so I put together this FAQ for you.

Erin moves to Colorado, 2015: FAQ

  1. When are you leaving? October 2 is the plan.
  2. Why are you leaving us? My fellowship at Harvard has come to a close, and while I love lots of things about Boston, I really miss Colorado. This will come as no surprise to pretty much anyone who has ever spent more than 15 seconds talking to me, but I need my mountains and my rivers and my family and my blue, blue skies.
  3. Where are you going to live? My ever-so-generous parents have agreed to house me and my stuff for a few months while I figure it out. Boulder, Denver, and even a few ski towns are on the list, but overall, TBD.
  4. So, you’re moving back in with your parents? I’m also traveling a ton over the next few months, so really, I’m just being practical here.
  5. Are you nervous? Of course! Moving kind of sucks. I should know; I’m an expert at this point. But I’m also really excited to try working for myself.
  6. What are you going to do? Ski, ride bikes, climb mountains, raft rivers, hang with my folks, spend time with old friends, maybe blog some or write a book.
  7. No, I mean for work, Erin. Oh, right, that. I’ve been doing some research consulting over the past four years with groups like UNFPA, the Nike Foundation, UNICEF, and US-based community health groups. The plan is to continue that work and formalize my own research consulting business. If you know anyone who needs some questions answered about economics, cost-benefit analysis, gender, violence, children, or other related issues, I’m your girl. (Basically, hire me, please.)
  8. Wait, that sounds awesome; can I work for you? Uhh, maybe! I could use some help every once in awhile.
  9. Will there be a powder clause in that contract? Duh.
  10. Are you going on the market this year? I’m certainly open to looking for an academic job, but I’m really excited to try this thing on my own for a bit. In addition, moving around the last four years has taken a lot out of me; I’m ready for some stability. I think there are lots of opportunities for me to be involved with universities while not being on the tenure track. Adjuncting, lecturing for friends (I’m great at Skype lectures), spending a semester in China, or maybe even just living near campus and attending seminars. If you’ve got something awesome you think would be a good fit let me know!
  11. Are you going to keep publishing? Yup! I have a few papers in the publication pipeline now. I’m always looking for new projects and I’m hopeful that the consulting work I’m currently doing will lead to some publishable work as well.
  12. Are you sure you’re not just going to become a yoga instructor, eat a lot of pot chocolate chip cookies, and move to a Buddhist retreat center or something? I make no promises.

A note on changes in the study of economics

The NYT has an article about how Stanford is working to become an economics powerhouse (not that it wasn’t already a top school) through big hires and retention of great faculty. It’s a pretty insider-y article, but I did think there were a few nuggets. The first is something I noted early on in my time here, that economics these days, empirical microeconomics using big administrative datasets or requiring significant relationship building with policymakers, requires a lot of help, and many skills that traditional economics programs don’t really offer (management, hiring, cross-disciplinary work, etc.)

That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.

It kind of feels like a whole different ballgame. In some ways, it’s exciting. But I also worry about how it makes economics much more dependent on post-docs and grad students and large amounts of funding. All these things could make it harder to break into the discipline, to have an impact and make waves if you are lacking them. It may not be so extreme as to call it the physicsification of economics, but I see my astronomer and hard-sciences friends languishing in post-docs for years and it doesn’t look fun.

In terms of the overall conclusions of the piece, Greg Mankiw’s comment about how Harvard/MIT’s dominance will be hard to challenge resonated with me, merely for a reason of concentration of economists. Having spent a little more than a year now at Harvard and twelve years at various other institutions studying and teaching economics, I can’t stress enough how different this place is from other institutions. There are economists everywhere in Cambridge, which means more seminars, more chances to run into someone working on something exciting, more visitors, more events. Now that classes are back in session, I remember how much I love seminars and workshops. It’s awesome to hear about new things that people are trying and to hear how great minds think about different problems in estimation and methodology. It’s been a real privilege. It’s also really fun to chime in and have Larry Katz nod in agreement or Michael Kremer tell you that you have a good idea.

Though if Boston gets another winter like last one, who knows what will happen!

Female empowerment, decisionmaking, and how to measure it

How we define women’s empowerment or autonomy using decisionmaking questions in the DHS surveys (and similar questions in other surveys) has always bothered me. I’m glad someone decided to look into it rigorously.

While there has been little evidence explicitly testing indicators and sources of bias in conventional intrahousehold decisionmaking, the literature does discuss a number of reoccurring limitations. The first is around the treatment of jointness in decisionmaking. Although questions are typically sensitive enough to identify whether a decision is made solely by the woman or jointly by the woman and someone else, how should we treat these distinctions? Whereas it is tempting to assume for all cases that an autonomous decision, relative to a joint decision, is the one in which the woman has more power, the rationale for that possible ranking must clearly be conditioned on household composition. In a household with several adult members, a woman is more likely to make joint decisions based on sharing of resources and responsibilities. In addition, in such cases, it is often difficult to understand in the presentation of indicators with whom the decision is being made jointly and how much that matters for rankings. The implications for women’s empowerment may be very different if the woman is making a decision jointly with her spouse or if she is making it jointly with her father, mother-in-law, or son. Further, in western societies, we often think that in the most equitable partnerships, decisions are discussed through open communication and made jointly. Therefore, it could be claimed that joint 5 decisions should be ranked equal to or preferred to sole decisions; however, the actual dynamic may vary case by case. The issue of jointness further interacts with the importance of the decisionmaking domain. For example, one woman may make a sole decision on a relatively less important domain (for example, daily food preparation) and another woman a joint decision on a relatively more important domain (for example, purchase of a house). In this case, how would we rank or interpret their decisionmaking power relative to each other?

From a new paper by Amber Peterman and colleagues on women’s decisionmaking indicators and their usefulness. (Emphasis added by me).