Best of #econtwitter - College admissions + Meta papers, special supplement

Aug 04, 2023

There were too many good papers in this week’s regular edition, and so I decided to save two mega research efforts for an extra email.

College admissions (Chetty-Deming-Friedman)

^received the NYT treatment of course. Deming started a Substack which summarizes better

The nut graf [sic]:

That they got the data is 🤯🤯🤯 (the substack has more of the story under “Behind the Curtain”):

More graphs:

^…

Interesting context (the data used in the paper ends in 2015):

The popular commentary on all these figures is econometrically deranged. For example, the claim that the first graph shows “affirmative action for the rich” cannot be made convincingly from these figures alone (even if very plausible) unless you think SAT/ACT scores fully capture admit potential, i.e. “no unobserved heterogeneity” across income percentiles. Still:

^interesting discussion continues here (the paper itself discusses these issues of course!)

To inject a bit of non-economic commentary:

^folks there’s no first welfare theorem for allocation by university administrators. Matt Yglesias has a whole column on this

The causal effect of elite universities (Chetty-Deming-Friedman, part 2)

This is from the same paper, but really could be a standalone blockbuster

^in other words: “exogenous admission to Ivy+ colleges really changes the odds of reaching the *tails* of the income distribution, elite grad schools and firms; while not affecting mean income.” ATE isn’t everything!

Two substack posts on this part of the paper:

^btw, the reason these last two tweets have so few views despite being so important: the twitter algorithm continues to completely nuke any tweet thread which links to a *.substack.com URL (you can get around this with tinyurl.com)