READING COHORTS
What is a reading cohort?
A reading cohort is just a group of people who read and discuss papers together. The main cohort will have papers that UES members select and cover a variety of topics, but if you can get at least one other person to join you, we can also help you set up your own reading cohorts about whatever subfields or topics in economics that you wish. There are a lot of papers out there, so if you’re interested in reading any, bring them up during a meeting!
MEETING INFORMATION
Spring 2022:
This quarter, the reading cohort will meet less often in order to account for other events and activities that UES is organizing. The reading cohort is still public to everyone even if you are not in UES. Join us in Kerckhoff 152 at 6 PM on Wednesdays when reading cohorts are happening as specified below.
Week 2
Wednesday, April 6, 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Kerckhoff 152
This paper looks at economic games with 15 small scale societies around the world to see if our preferences for things like fairness are consistent throughout the world. Heinrich et al. looks at how decision-making changes across societies and tries to give explanations for these differences through analyzing how that each society's idiosyncratic heuristics and preferences came to be. We will be discussing this paper in Week 2's meeting. You can find a link to this paper here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.2.73
Week 5
Wednesday, April 27, 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Kerckhoff 152
Why does the dollar remain the dominant currency, and how does that change the way we approach trade policy? Famous economists have debated the question, all the way from the early papers of Paul Krugman to today’s research by economists like Gita Gopinath, Kenneth Rogoff, Pierre-Oliver Gourinchas, and UCLA’s own Oleg Itskhoki. Based on the forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of International Economics by Itskhoki and Gopinath, dollar dominance challenges some of the most common assumptions that economists have previously made about trade, such as that a devaluation of the currency leads to a boost in exports.
Check with the youtube playlist with an introduction to the topic and an optional lecture at:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_mPBf7JRO62bVqOkeeud_si4xrXhFssM
Read the optional HIE chapter chapter at:
https://itskhoki.com/papers/DCPhandbook.pdf
PAST READING COHORTS
Winter 2022:
Reading Cohort Meeting 1
Wednesday, January 5, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
We will be discussing Ordinary Least Squares Regression and Random Control Trials.
The paper we will be discussing in Week 3 that applies these concepts is on the Oregon Medicaid Study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535298/). This study is an RCT that uses least-squares regression to see how subsidizing health insurance for low-income adults affects healthcare consumption and health outcomes.
Reading Cohort Meeting 2
Wednesday, January 12, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
We will discuss the following paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives: The Economic Lives of the Poor (https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.1.141). This paper outlines different aspects of the economic lives of some of the world’s poorest residents in areas such as healthcare, education, and migration.
Reading Cohort Meeting 3
Wednesday, January 19, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
We will discuss the Oregon Medicaid Study (see Week 1). Afterward, we will review difference-in-differences, a statistical technique to compare changes over time. This will be a main feature of the study we will be reviewing in Week 5, a very influential paper by David Card and Alan Krueger on the effects (or lack thereof) of minimum wage increases on employment (https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf).
Reading Cohort Meeting 4
Wednesday, January 26, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
How can you tell when something shady is going on? That’s a question that economists have always tried to answer when it comes to corruption in cheating. Mark Duggan and Steven Levitt (author of Freakonomics) run a case study in examining professional Sumo wrestling in Japan and find strong evidence that matchfixing is very common even at the highest levels of the sport. For details on how they used econometrics to reach their conclusions, read Winning Isn’t Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling at https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/000282802762024665.
Reading Cohort Meeting 5
Wednesday, February 2, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
It’s a fact we learn early on in microeconomics--when the price of a good rises, the quantity demanded falls in reaction, and that same idea should apply to labor. Yet, if we put our theory to the test, our results may run opposite to our expectations. Using difference-in-differences analysis, two economists compared the number of workers in fast food establishments in neighboring counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey--the latter of which having raised its minimum wage previously--to arrive at a surprising conclusion about the effects of changes in the minimum wage on the quantity of labor. Read the paper here: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf.
Reading Cohort Meeting 6
Wednesday, February 9, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
Universities are extremely important institutions, and as the world becomes more globalized, it is important to ask how the international flow of students affects the American university system. The Journal of Economic Perspectives has compiled a report on the supply, demand, and consequences of international students coming to the US to study. Read it now at: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.35.1.163.
Reading Cohort Meeting 7
Wednesday, February 16, 6:15 - 7:00 PM
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97464527439
Why are some nations poor and others rich? This paper by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson explores settler mortality as an instrument to examine the effect of extractive and inclusive institutions on a country’s current day wealth. This paper would go on to inform a lot of what is in the popular book “Why Nations Fail”. There will be no econometrics review after this meeting since our last reading cohort will be on Week 8. A link to the paper can be found here: https://economics.mit.edu/files/4123
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do I have to be part of UES to join a reading cohort?
Nope!
How is the main reading cohort structured?
During the first week’s meeting, there will be a review session on some econometrics concepts. At the end of the meeting, there will be a paper recommended as reading which incorporates the concepts covered in the review. We will then discuss this paper during the third week’s meeting, cover another concept, and then read another paper that will be the topic of the Week 5 meeting, and so on.
During even-numbered weeks (starting on Week 2), we will discuss a paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives. As stated on the JEP’s website, “the [Journal] fills the gap between the general interest press and academic economics journals.” Therefore, its publications tend to contain fewer mathematical models and methods while illustrating results in a manner more likely to be understood by a wider audience. This does not, by any means, imply that the Journal does not provide useful insights. In fact, at the undergraduate level, these sorts of papers can be much more helpful than extremely technical ones.
What will I learn regarding econometrics?
The concepts covered during the odd-numbered week meetings will be study and model designs that commonly appear in economics studies. They typically appear in upper-division (or sometimes graduate) econometrics courses. The focus will be on a conceptual understanding of how these designs work, and why economists might want to use them. This helps us understand the ideas that the authors of studies are trying to communicate to their audience.
JEP papers, on the other hand, don’t require as much knowledge about econometrics to understand. In fact, you can read some articles without having taken any statistics at all. Some papers in the journal do go into more detail about statistical modeling and econometric methods, but the authors take care to spell them out clearly.