Board of Visitors
Elizabeth Obershaw
Managing Director, Horsley Bridge Partners
Elizabeth joined Horsley Bridge Partners, a private equity firm, in 2007. For the previous 16 years she was the Chief Investment Officer of Hewlett-Packard Company’s U.S. retirement plans, investing across the major public and private market asset classes. Elizabeth holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford University.
Board of Visitors
Clay D. Young
Retired Senior Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP
Clay is a retired senior partner from Deloitte & Touche LLP. He served clients predominantly in the Technology and Banking sectors, specializing in ERP implementation and IT/Cyber auditing. He held various roles in practice leadership and for client service teams during his 33 years at Deloitte. Clay has served on the boards of Junior Achievement and RAFT (Resource Area for Teachers). He has a BA in Economics from UCLA, and an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago.
As UCLA continued to teach remotely for Fall 2020, our faculty continued to adapt their teaching methods to provide a high level of education to our students. We are very thankful to have the prestigious and innovative faculty that we have. We want to give a big congratulations to Andy Atkeson—the winner of the Warren C. Scoville Distinguished Teaching Award for best undergraduate teaching in Fall 2020.
Andy Atkeson won this award while teaching ECON 167 and Econ 188M courses. Econ 167-Victims and Villians; Panics and Bubble-focuses on the phenomena of panics, bubbles, and manias in financial history. Students have an in-depth analysis and discussions of underlying causes, private and public policy responses, similarities, and contemporary issues in today’s financial landscape. This course also covers five many financial crises: panic of 1907, Great Depression, Japanese real estate and stock market bubbles of 1980s, American banking crises of 1980s, and Asian Contagion of late 1990s. Students read case studies relating to each, and more general related readings including speeches, papers, and articles.
Econ 188M-Practicum in Social Entrepreneurship-offers students full-scale immersion into challenges of launching social enterprise. Students work in teams alongside staff of local nonprofit organizations in 10-week social enterprise accelerator program aimed at helping participating organizations secure financial and operational resources they need to implement social enterprise for which viable business plan has already been constructed. Students meet assigned organization, study its business plan, and work with instructors of course and staff of nonprofit organization to develop tailored plan of work for 10-week accelerator program. Students carry out work in conjunction with staff of organization under supervision of instructors and with assistance of experienced entrepreneur volunteer mentors.
Warren C. Scoville was a faculty member for the UCLA Department of Economics for 28 years before his death in 1969. This award is given quarterly in his name to the ladder faculty member who receives the highest teaching evaluation scores from his or her course.
As Oracle, Palantir and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise move their headquarters out of California and Elon Musk moves to Texas, California is considering raising taxes on the wealthy to unprecedented levels. Lee Ohanian and other experts say California needs to find more ways to reverse the trend. Watch the full video produced by CNBC, “What’s Driving California’s Mass Exodus?” below.
The UCLA Department of Economics is sad to announce that William R. Allen (1924-2021) passed away on January 15, 2021. Allen obtained his A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) from Cornell College (1948) and his Ph.D. from Duke University (1953). He instructed at Washington University prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 1952. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, Southern Illinois University, and Texas A&M University, and he has been on the faculty of the Colorado School of Banking.
He has been a consultant to the Balance of Payments Division of the Department of Commerce and a director of the Yardney Corporation. He was Chairman of the Department of Economics from 1967–1969. A recipient of various scholarship awards as a student, his professional research (largely in International Economics, Monetary Economics, and the History of Economic Theory) has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation. He has received the UCLA Alumni Association Award for the Art of Teaching, the Western Economic Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Foundation at Valley Forge Award for Excellence in Private Enterprise Education. He has been Vice President and President of the Western Economic Association, Vice President of the History of Economics Society, Vice President and a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Economic Association, and a director of the University Professors for Academic Order. He was the economics correspondent of the California Political Review, on the editorial board of the Social Science Quarterly, and on the advisory board of the History of Political Economy. He has participated extensively in conference, seminar, and lecture programs. He has authored, co-authored, and edited nine books and has contributed widely to professional journals in the United States and elsewhere. Among the ten greatest books ever written in economics is University Economics. First published in 1972, this textbook that is co-authored by Armen A. Alchian (1914-2013) and William R. Allen is a marvel. If you read it and grasp even no more than one-third of its lessons you will gain keener insights into economic forces at work than are had by some Nobel laureates in economics. If you grasp most of the lessons of this book, you will possess economic insight that is rivaled by very few people indeed.
In 1974, he was appointed the first President of the International Institute for Economic Research; he was then Vice President of the Institute for Contemporary Studies, with which the International Institute for Economic Research merged in 1986. From 1990-1992 he was an associate of the Reason Foundation.
He has been a nationally syndicated radio commentator and a newspaper columnist, a Los Angeles television commentator and an occasional magazine essayist. From 1978 to 1992 more than 200 radio stations carried daily broadcasts of “the Midnight Economist” written and delivered by Allen.
The UCLA community will miss him dearly and our thoughts are with his family at this time.
Other articles remembering Bill Allen:
We are excited to announce that Denis Chetverikov has been named the co-editor of Econometric Theory. Since its inception, Econometric Theory has been one of the leading journals in Econometrics (the development and application of statistical methods within economics). ET is an innovative journal dedicated to advance theoretical research in econometrics; it contains original theoretical contributions in all of the major areas of the field. In addition, ET fosters the multidisciplinary features of econometrics that extend beyond economics (e.g. mathematical finance, stochastic processes, statistics, and probability theory). ET also encourages submissions that promote best practice econometrics by demonstrating new theory in conjunction with the practical implementation of theory.
Denis Chetverikov is an Associate Professor of Economics at UCLA. His research interests lie broadly in the fields of Econometrics and Mathematical Statistics. He received his PhD from MIT in 2013, when he joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor. His recent research includes work on high-dimensional models, shape restrictions, and applications of empirical process theory in econometrics. He has been published in Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Annals of Statistics, and the Annals of Probability.
Prof. Natalie Bau
Despite dramatic expansions in access to schooling in low-income countries, learning levels remain low. For example, in rural Pakistan, 25% of primary school students don’t experience any test score gains over the course of year. This has led to substantial interest by policymakers and researchers alike in interventions such as teacher training that aim to improve school quality for all students. However, when these interventions are evaluated, many of them deliver only small or moderate effects.
Improving the instructional match between students and schools in low-income countries offers an alternative, promising avenue for increasing learning. Intuitively, instructional mismatch captures the idea that a student who needs a remedial math class is unlikely to benefit from advanced calculus, no matter how well-taught. Likewise, a student who needs an advanced calculus class is unlikely to benefit from remedial math. Thus, improving instructional match for one student may reduce the learning of another student. In low-income countries, where a single teacher often teaches an entire grade and cannot target the instructional needs of all students, mismatch may be a particularly serious problem.
Despite its intuitive appeal, relatively little is known about the quantitative importance of instructional mismatch. Moreover, little is known about how school competition affects schools’ choices of instructional level. Understanding the effects of school competition is important because private schooling and school competition are key forces in low-income countries throughout South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa: 30% of primary school enrollment in rural Pakistan is in private schools, and the average rural village has more than 2 private schools.
A new discussion paper entitled “Estimating an Equilibrium Model of Horizontal Competition in Education” sheds light on these questions. In the paper, Professor Natalie Bau develops a new equilibrium model of school competition, where private schools select their instructional levels to maximize their profits. Estimating this model with rich data from rural Pakistan’s competitive educational markets, she quantifies the importance of instructional match. Moving a student from a school with her worst possible instructional match to one with her best possible match would improve test scores by the same amount as roughly one-year of additional schooling.
Additionally, Professor Bau finds that individuals from poorer households are substantially less responsive to a schools’ match-specific quality when they make enrollment decisions. This may be driven by the fact that poorer students have less information about school quality (their self-reported rankings of school quality are less correlated with their predicted test score gains from attending a school). As a result, profit-maximizing private schools – responding to competitive incentives — choose instructional levels that are better-suited to wealthier students because these students make enrollment decisions that are more responsive to quality. Relative to the instructional levels a social planner optimizing welfare would choose, this leads to greater inequality between wealthier and poorer students within the same private school, as well as welfare and learning losses. The entry of a new private school into the market intensifies competition for richer students, exacerbating this effect and increasing within-school inequality in the private sector.
Finally, Professor Bau uses her model to evaluate the effects of a social planner choosing the instructional level of private schools to maximize welfare. While doing so decreases inequality and leads to moderate test score gains, the gains from these policies alone are limited by the fact that less-wealthy students are not very responsive to quality. As a result, all schools must choose instructional levels that service both types of students, rather than product differentiating and allowing students to match to their best-fit schools. Much larger gains are possible when poorer students make enrollment decisions that are more responsive to quality, allowing for better instructional match.
Altogether, these findings suggest that improving instructional match can be an important tool for increasing learning in low-income countries but also highlight the challenges to improving instructional match. Increased competition can actually increase mismatch by incentivizing private schools to cater more intensively to the instructional needs of their wealthy students. Additionally, efforts that aim to increase instructional match may need to be paired with informational interventions that improve students’ ability to sort into their best-match schools.
The International Association of Applied Econometrics(IAAE) recently announced their newly elected fellows of the Association. UCLA’s Professor Moshe Buchinsky will be joining 47 other econometricians as a fellow for the 2020-2021 year. The International Association for Applied Econometrics (IAAE) was established at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. IAAE works frequently with the Faculty of Economics and strives to further advance the field of applied econometrics through publications, conferences, seminars, and numerous other activities. The aim of the Association is to advance the education of the public in the subject of econometrics and its applications to a variety of fields in economics, in particular, but not exclusively, by advancing and supporting research in that field, and disseminating the results of such useful research to the public.
Professor Buchinsky’s work is largely in applied econometrics and labor, developing and estimating structural models using microdata. Most of his work is on educational choices, changes in the wage distribution and mobility.
Professor Lee Ohanian recently presented the annual Baxter Liberty Lecture at UC Berkeley on The Tarnishing of the Golden State: How Poorly Designed Policies Killed the California Dream on December 8th, 2020. Watch the full video below.
The Baxter Liberty Initiative is a program in Berkeley’s Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, established by UC Berkeley Foundation Trustee Frank Baxter. Each lecture features an intellectual leader whose expertise and scholarship focuses on the ideal of freedom in political and economic life.
UCLA’s Professor Atkeson, along side Harvard’s Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina and James H. Stock, have been researching the effects of comprehensive COVID-19 screening and how it could help improve the current US economy. Their research shows how testing often in every household would induce GDP growth as well as greatly reducing the number of people and businesses sidelined by COVID-19–related fears and unnecessary quarantines while also lowering actual sickness and death rates.
The UCLA Anderson Review recently published an article Comprehensive COVID-19 Screening Would Pay for Itself Many Times Over, which discusses their research more in depth.
