Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

An introduction to spatial analysis

After my first, rather disastrous, year of graduate school in Boulder, I almost transferred to Geography. Or at least, I thought a lot about it. While the math in Economics was kind of kicking my butt, everyone working with graphs and maps seemed so blissfully happy. Ultimately, I stuck it out in Economics, and am extremely glad that I did, but I haven’t lost my love of maps and have always been curious about spatial research.

Next week, I’ll be doing a three-day workshop at the University of Colorado‘s Institute of Behavioral Science. Many of my economics professors were associated with IBS, but none really did spatial analysis, so I was left to find out some of it on my own. A few years ago, I helped design a survey on handwashing and other hygiene behaviors for a group building latrines and protecting water sources in Nepal. The data are fascinating and though we started analyzing it, everyone had limited use of one of the two tools necessary to do spatial regression. I had the Stata skills and my coauthors had limited GIS skills, but combining them wasn’t going to happen. This short course is hopefully the next step in getting those papers off the ground and into journals, but also more importantly, back to the community where we did the research. Though we’ve presented some findings to them, I’m sure there are many more insights to be had with these data.

With that, I’ll be reading a lot of spatial analysis papers over the next week. The syllabus has hundreds of pages of reading, much of which I’ve printed out and am planning for my long trip back to Colorado next week, but I’m willing to share the “lite” version with you all.

For definitional purposes, spatial analysis is “the formal quantitative study of phenomena that manifest themselves in space,” according to Luc Anselin. More informatively, I think, spatial analysis allows us to “interpret what ‘near’ and ‘distant’ mean in a particular context” and showcase whether and how proximity or location have an effect on an outcome we’re interested in.

Anselin divides spatial analysis into two categories–data-driven analysis and model-driven analysis, and highlights the challenges of each, which I imagine will get plenty of air time next week and are a little bit daunting to a student and devotee of econometrics:

Indeed, the characteristics of spatial data (dependence and heterogeneity) often void the attractive properties of standard statistical techniques. Since most EDA techniques are based on an assumption of independence, they cannot be implemented uncritically for spatial data…As a result, many results from the analysis of time series data will not apply to spatial data.

Model-driven analysis seems much more up my alley and suited to regression, but the main problem, which I encountered in my own research, “is how to formalize the role of ‘space.'”

Just like this basic the ideas and tools used in spatial regression seem fairly consistent with my view of econometrics in general. There are tradeoffs to employing different models and assumptions, and measurement error is alive and well. Notably, although this could be out of date by now: “Spatial effects in models with limited dependent variables, censored and truncated distributions, or in models that have count data have been largely ignored…multivariate dependent distributions other than the normal are highly complex.” More to come, I’m sure. My colleague has already told me I have to teach him in the Fall, and I’m hoping to be able to incorporate some of this into my Methods class, so get ready for some spatial econometrics here.

As an aside, if you happen to be in Colorado, check out these cool solar events that are happening, including a world-record-braeking attempt at the most people in one place to watch a solar eclipse together at CU’s Folsom Stadium. Or, well, you could just go look at it where you are, too.

Referenced: Anselin, Luc. 1989. “What Is Special about Spatial Data? Alternative Perspectives on Spatial Data Analysis.” Conference Proceedings, Spatial Statistics: Past, Present, and Future. Institute of Mathematical Geography, Syracuse University.

Anticipating divorce

This Journal of Human Resources paper by Elizabeth Ananat and Guy Michaels is a few years old now, but as I’m readying my first dissertation chapter for submission, I’ve been reading up and reminding myself of various literatures and it seemed appropriate. Ananat and Michaels present an intuitive, causal story for how divorce causes women to live in poverty. It seems pretty straightforward: the break-up of a marriage means women are less likely to live in a household without income from someone else, but also that women work to compensate for such income losses by going back to work, moving in with siblings, etc.

Divorce increases the probability of living in a household without other earners. In fact, we estimate that breakup of the first marriage significantly increases the likelihood that a woman lives in a household with less than $5,000 of annual income from others—the likelihood rises from just over 5 percent for those whose first marriage is intact to nearly 50 percent for those whose first marriage breaks up. However, women can and do respond to income loss from divorce by combining with other households, through paths including remarriage or moving in with a roommate, sibling, or parents. Moreover, women further compensate through private (for example, alimony and child support) and public (for example, welfare) transfers, and by increasing their own labor supply.

I use the same logic to say that as long as she has some idea that the divorce (or union dissolution in my case as I include unmarried couples) is imminent, a woman should make compensatory decisions regarding the future loss of income, not just the immediate loss of income.

E.O. Ananat with Guy Michaels. “The Effect of Marital Breakup on the Income and Poverty of Women with Children.” Journal of Human Resources 43.3 (2008): 611-629.

The downfall of data

The PAAs last week were all about data. The exhibits at the conference were sponsored by various longitudinal surveys such as the PSID, the Mexican Family and Life Survey, RAND FLS and more. As I perused the poster sessions, it was amazing how many posters came from employees at the US Census Bureau. Having interviewed there last year, I was aware of their numbers, but the PAAs bring to light just how much work they are doing at the Census to illuminate American life. Beyond that, presentations used the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data, as I do, the NLSY, the ACS, the Mexican Migration Project, and so many more. The concentration on data was unlike I’ve seen at any other conference. Theory was definitely not a big focus.

So, it’s with sadness that today I saw the news that the House voted to cut funding for the American Community Survey, a Census Bureau instrument that tracks all sorts of data about Americans. I received the survey at my home in Boulder shortly after the decennial Census. My roommates, feeling survey fatigued, refused to fill it out, but I, being the economist and possible eventual end-user of this data, went ahead. I also encouraged friends and family to fill out their Census forms.

This comes on the heels of funding being cut for the NLSY (though restored for FY 2012), a concurrent distaste for political science research in the House, and doesn’t bode well for other demographic endeavors. Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, biostatisticians, public health researchers, epidemiologists, political scientists and more depend on these data–from studies already in existence and to-be-collected–to do meaningful and interesting research. While (sometimes) privately funded, small-scale longitudinal studies like the Fragile Families study provide a good snapshot of groups, only nationwide, representative studies can help us to know what is going on in the country as a whole.

The link above claimed the survey was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Which is absolute crap. The US government does things that are far more invasive than ask how many years you went to school and how many flush toilets you have. And far less useful.

Update: John Sides talks about his NSF Grant and similarly cut funding for political science research on the Monkey Cage blog.

Amendment 1 passes and the PAAs

This space has been quiet for the past few days and will likely remain so for the next couple. I’ve just returned from San Francisco and have a stack of papers to grade before my principles exams come in on Friday.

The PAAs were really fantastic. I got to meet some really talented scholars, listen to some interesting paper presentations and got really good feedback on my own paper. Conferences are hard. There’s so much time sitting and listening, something academics aren’t very accustomed. Despite years of training, it seems to be a skill we lose upon graduation, our hands itching to shoot up and say our piece. But my discussant (who I discovered was a CU grad, too!) was great and I’m so grateful for everyone’s attendance and the spirited discussion at the end of the session. I hope to be able to return next year for the meetings in New Orleans and make this a part of my regular circuit. In particular, the Economic Demography workshop on the Wednesday just prior to the start of the meetings, showcased six quality papers that were so great to hear. My advisor organized it, natch.

On a sadder note, Amendment 1 passed in North Carolina today. My facebook and twitter feeds were full of disappointment from all sides and, as one of my former homes, I took it a little personally. It’s hard to see how national polls show a plurality supporting gay marriage or at least civil unions when states keep passing ridiculous laws that will be difficult for the next generation to dismantle. At the same time, how is it reasonable for a state to put forth such a controversial amendment when the side that would have likely opposed it has a candidate running essentially unopposed. Maybe that’s the point, but really, not cool, North Carolina.

I will try to post more on the PAAs, my paper, the Economic Demography conference and more in the next week. I’d love to share some details about some of the papers I saw presented as well, and hope those will come into the public eye soon.

For now, though, thank goodness for Chocolate Fudge Brownie.

Reflections on a semester of blogging

There are many important issues in the news right now that I’d love to write about. There are policy decisions and campaign statements and housing woes and education debates that are all demanding my attention. Unfortunately, so is grading, and a trip to SF, and so I thought I would take a few minutes to reflect on the semester and particularly the inclusion of student blogging in my quantitative methods class this semester.

First, the positives. I really like that my students were writing every week. I think it’s important for their development as thinkers and economists to find ways to express themselves in various ways. Looking over their posts from the semester, I see significant growth in their thinking about econometrics and economic issues in their blogging and am excited to read their final thoughts this week on Donohue and Levitt’s (in)famous abortion and crime paper. I have pretty strong feelings about Freakonomics, but I hope that by reading the Freakonomics chapter, other chapters from the book, the actual paper that prompted the main thesis of the chapter and one of the primary critiques, they can reasonably evaluate the merits and failings of all sides of the argument.

Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of teaching this course has been how to help students to understand that statistical significance is not necessarily the end goal in itself. I’m not grading their papers on whether they found a significant result, but rather their ability to explain it. In reading several chapter of two books, the news, and working through their own research process, I hope that they begin to understand the distinction. I tried to design writing assignments to reflect an understanding of numbers, or coefficients, and will be looking to make that more explicit in upcoming semesters.

All of my students had some great insights throughout the semester. Whether in reading an article in the news and relating that to their research, or finding a connection between a chapter in Poor Economics and some aspect of their own research, it’s been exciting to see them grow and incorporate their lives into their writing and academic work. I’m not sure I made any bloggers for life, but I do hope they all continue writing and finding ways to share their work.

On the not-so-good side, I need to find a better way to track their posts and comments and a better way to ask them to read what each other is writing. Requiring commenting appeared not to be sufficient. I would like to have larger conversations on the blogging platform about the posts themselves. Perhaps requiring everyone read a particular student’s post in a given week and comment there is a better solution. Asking students to read different pieces of books or different articles might solve this as well. Although I think it’s useful for students to read different analyses of a topic they themselves have analyzed, I would like to split the kind of commenting they do a little more in order to expose them to more topics. In addition, much of the commenting was within small groups I only realized existed later in the semester. Students from one fraternity tended to read mostly each others’ posts, for instance. I would have liked to see more integration, but that was my shortsightedness, and it will be remedied.

Related to the issue of topics is the issue of books, reading different books, or more books, or articles may be in order. I chose Poor Economics and Freakonomics for their accessibility and ready discussion of statistics, but surely there are others. I have ruled out More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, for reasons I might explicate here some other day, but surely there are others. Perhaps some Dan Ariely, or parts of Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays.

Another significant problem was length. I found it difficult to keep up 25 students worth of writing every week. In the future, I will be stricter and more explicit about length requirements. In order to stay on top of it, and help students develop the skill of writing concisely, maximum word counts are definitely in order.

I’m still exploring ways to better incorporate twitter into the classroom. I know that many of my students read this blog and thus see many of my tweets on the sidebar, but they are still mostly passive readers. Perhaps it’s too much to try to incorporate social media in a class that’s already jam-packed with mountains of new information, but I did like the few opportunities I had to bring it up.

All in all, I think it’s a great way to do writing exercises. Even the limited exposure my students had to outside commentary was useful and a good reminder of how they can use their ideas to shape opinions and contribute to wider conversations. Next time, I’ll do some things differently, but we will keep blogging. You can follow a whole new group of students in the Fall, and even more of them in the Spring! Look for us later on, and of course, you’ll hear plenty from me in the next few months. Thanks for a great semester, for all your thoughts and tweets and emails, and if anyone has thoughts about how to make the student blogging process smoother or more integrative or more useful to students, I’d be very happy to hear your ideas in an email or the comments section.

Weekend Roundup and off to SF

VAWA passed! 68-31. Notably, Kay Bailey Hutchison, who engineered a substitute with Chuck Grassley, voted for it, and all 31 Republican men voted against it.

If you haven’t read Mona Eltahawy’s essay in Foreign Policy: “Why do they hate us?“, you should. Then you should go watch Melissa Harris Perry moderate a discussion between Mona and another Egyptian feminist, Leila Ahmed. (Samhita has it on her latest post at Feministing.)

In other news, today was my last day of teaching this semester. Agreeing to attend a conference the last week of classes was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but all in all, I think I’m ready. I’ll be in San Francisco for the Population Association of America meetings (PAAs) from Wednesday to Monday, attending sessions, tweeting about demography and families, and eating a lot of good food. Apparently, events are already starting. I arrive Wednesday and will be going to the Economic Demography session on Wednesday afternoon and more. If you’re in town, my session is on Friday morning: 96. Stop by!

Session 96:
Child Health
Friday, May 4
10:30 AM – 12:20 PM
Continental Parlor 1
Ballroom Level

Chair: Laura M. Argys, University of Colorado at Denver
Discussant: Susan L. Averett, Lafayette College
Discussant: Anoshua Chaudhuri, San Francisco State University

1. The “Marriage Advantage” in Infant Health Outcomes: Evidence of Selection or Risky Behavior? • Jennifer Buher Kane, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2. Expectations of Support: Health Investments and Promises of Financial Assistance for Children • Erin K. Fletcher, Gettysburg College

3. Parental Age at Birth and Longevity of Offspring in Centenarian Families: The Role of Biology, Social Interaction and Culture • Valérie Jarry, Université de Montréal; Alain Gagnon, Université de Montréal; Robert R. Bourbeau, Université de Montréal

4. The Psychological and Physical Well-Being of Involved, Low-Income Fathers • Letitia Kotila, Ohio State University

VAWA on the Senate Floor

The Violence Against Women Act is up for renewal this year and is now on the Senate Floor. While we shouldn’t be surprised in this contentious political climate that bills that formerly renewed with broad bipartisan support are suddenly fodder for filibusters and other nonsense, this one is really important.

A colleague and I were discussing the bill last night. She contends that some groups put things into the bill that were unnecessary, particularly in an election year, and that’s hampering its forward progress. But the response by some lawmakers to limit the usefulness of VAWA would have overwhelmingly negative effects, by putting women and their families in more danger, increasing stigma, and reducing reporting.

Some of the problems outlined with the Grassley-Hutchison substitute are here, but in general, the substitute shows an extreme lack of understanding of the problems associated with violence against women, gender-based violence, and external effects of increased penalties, stricter reporting and cooperation requirements and more.

#ReauthorizeVAWA on twitter

Testing, incentives, and low-achieving students, redux

Last week, a few kind words from a friend turned into an extended conversation about testing structures and incentives for teachers to help low-achieving students. Mark’s organization is unique and very cool because it targets the lowest achievers, students Mark posited are the least likely to benefit from the incentives provided by standardized testing to maximize the pass rate. Brett Keller responded with a link to a discussion of an article from the Review of Economics and Statistics that basically confirmed Mark’s thinking.

Below is a quick summary of a long, dense paper and lessons learned. In short, Mark, yes, research backs up your intuition. From “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability” by Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach:

The use of proficiency counts as performance measures provides strong incentives for schools to focus on students who are near the proficiency standard but weak incentives to devote extra attention to students who are already proficient or have little chance of becoming proficient in the near term.

Students who might just need a little extra push to get to the passing mark are going to get any extra teaching effort that is encouraged by the testing system itself, and even may draw effort that might have gone to students at the ends of the distribution. It seems that this problem at least would unite parents of the highest and lowest achievers in protest. Low achieving students are left behind and high-ability students make no gains either. This system is clearly not beneficial to anyone except the marginal passers and ensures that low-achieving students never have an opportunity to catch up.

The continual process of raising the standards only makes worse the distribution problem. In their model, an increase in the proficiency standard necessarily increases the number of high-ability students receiving extra attention, thus decreasing the number of low-achieving students receiving extra attention.

The study was also repeated with low-stakes testing, where the individual student may have had something to gain by passing (not going to summer school), but the school had little to gain. The lopsided distribution of effort didn’t appear in these cases.

Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. 2010 “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92(2); 263-283.

An abstract

Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, and appropriately, I met with the Vice-Provost to negotiate my contract for next year. He only wanted to give me a one-year contract the first time around, despite knowing that the Economics department needed me and wanted me for two years, so clearly, I was going negotiate again.

Through the course of our discussion, I began to get a little nervous about upcoming calls for papers, conference deadlines and the looming market. As I have told a few of you, I will be on the market again in the Fall, attending the American Economic Association meetings in San Diego in January, and filling out ridiculous numbers of applications as the year comes to a close. There’s lots to be done, but also lots to finish up–getting my dissertation out–and lots to start–new papers!

So, I’m trying to get some papers out and I think I’m close to getting this one done. It’s so hard sometimes, because it’s really so easy just to keep editing, keep running regressions and keep looking for other things to do. But I like this paper. I hope some editor does, too. Hopefully, next week I can share the whole things with you.

Abstract for “Match Quality and Maternal Investments in Children”, Working Paper, April 2012, Erin K Fletcher.

Marriage advocates suggest that the unstable environment caused by divorce can have adverse effects on children’s educational and behavioral outcomes. However, the causal assignment of poor outcomes to the divorce itself fails to take into account relationship quality and heterogeneity in place before or in the absence of divorce. I explore the link between heterogeneity of relationship quality and investments in children. I show that women who report less satisfaction in their relationships spend less time reading with their children. I test various theoretical mechanisms by which we would expect women to decrease their investments in a child using additional information about the match including argument frequency and whether the union dissolves in the future. The anticipation of a union’s dissolution is associated with a decrease in investments in children while the relationship is intact, but argument frequency and mother’s estimation of the father’s character do not have a significant correlation. The results suggest that subjective measures tell a more complete story about investments in children than indicated by future union status, argument frequency or parental quality.

Have a great weekend!

Tests, incentives, and low-achieving students

In the midst of my paper-reading/grading marathon over the weekend, I expressed some frustration on twitter and got some pretty wonderful responses from friends. In particular, one friend who runs a non-profit in DC sent me an immediate gchat, “I believe in you; you can do it.” It managed to snap me out of it and put a smile on my face, but then also morphed into a discussion about the quality of students’ writing. Mark’s contention was that writing skills have in fact declined over time, largely because composition, grammar, and spelling aren’t emphasized any longer in school curricula. It’s not tested, so it’s not taught. I confessed my inability to make a claim about the decline given my limited tenure as a teacher and lack of good comparisons. I think I’m a pretty good writer.

This resulted in Mark calling me arrogant, so I had to laugh a little when Mark’s recent blog post for Reach, Inc. had an arrogance-related title, but he also brings up another really important point regarding incentives and testing in schools.

It is true that incentives are not aligned to support the work we do. If a student comes to Reach reading in the 5th percentile, he or she can make 2-3 years of reading growth and still be labeled a failure on standardized tests. This means, in an environment with limited resources, it actually doesn’t make sense for a school to invest in that child’s learning. The incentives push schools to focus on those students that can go from failing to passing.

I’ll admit that I’m only cursorily familiar with the practices and rewards of the public school system and testing, but I am pretty sure that we haven’t it gotten right yet. A system that rewards or punishes based on the mean or median or a dichotomous pass/fail and ignores distribution and progress is necessarily going to leave a lot of students behind. As Mark suggests, it makes it near impossible for individual students to catch up, not only because it’s hard work, but because there’s little immediate reward for stakeholders to do the pushing. It works the same way with writing. There’s not a good way to test writing, so we don’t test it, and thus it’s not emphasized in school, leading to worse outcomes in writing.

Mark’s work reminded of a paper I saw presented at CU this winter. In an RCT in Togo (or Benin? The researcher was from one of those and did the work in the other) an experiment was set up to see how different incentives schemes could reward cooperation to study for standardized tests and how that affected student outcomes from different parts of the ability distribution. The results make cooperation look pretty good. I of course, cannot remember the job candidate’s name or the title of the paper, but I’m going to find it. Don’t worry.