YouSaid · the spoken record

Raj Chetty

lines on the record: 75
first: 2017-05-24
most recent: 2017-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think current trends suggest that segregation will continue to grow in the US as you have, take the case of driverless cars, for example. One way that could go is if you have access to driverless cars, it makes it all the more easy to go live further away in a secluded place. Sure. Further reduce interaction, right? And so I think it's very important to think about social policy in the context of that type of technology. How do you set cities up? How do you do urban planning and architecture in a way such that you don't actually just facilitate more segregation, such that you make it attractive to live in a more mixed income community? That's a key challenge, I think.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a very big picture level, I mean, what in our research group would like to figure out is how we can increase upward mobility. We'd like to come with a recipe for how you can increase upward mobility in specific cities. In the long term, you might think that important recent trends like automation, driverless cars, these things could end up reshaping what cities look like. Maybe you'd be able to Strikes me as an important thing that I'd be like, that I'd like to be working on. What I see here in Silicon Valley is that technology is completely transformed the way we live our lives through the private sector. I think it's to date had less of an impact on social issues and there's a big arbitrage opportunity there.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the cities that have very high rates of upward mobility, do we see that there are more links between kids from low income and high income families? That would be suggestive. But then to get closer to causal inference, one way you might be able to do that is to exploit the fact that kids tend to be friends with children in the same grade, but not friends with kids who are one grade ahead or one grade behind, right? Now the network of kids you're exposed to is going to tend to fluctuate across grades just by chance. You might have more low income kids, more girls, more talented kids, etc. And so that's essentially going to be a random variation from the perspective of a given child. And you can see how you might be able to exploit that type of variation to understand whether the set of people you're connected to ends up affecting your life trajectory. So that's one early stage idea we're thinking about developing in that space.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the hope. That's the hope that we've got a team of collaborators there and we're starting to explore the data and figure out not by running experiments, of course, but just with the existing de-identified observational data, can we find patterns? So one example.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the things we talked about, Tyler is digging more into whether segregation and integration are really causal mechanisms that are driving differences in rates of upward mobility. So one way we're trying to get at that, which is very much in line with thinking about Silicon Valley, is using Facebook data. So in the past, people like Bob Putnam and others have talked a lot about social capital and integration as being a key determinant. But we've never been able to measure those things as precisely as we'd like to be able to. And Facebook data, more generally social network data, gives us, I think, the most precise lens to look at how people are connected and how that might influence their long-term outcomes.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influenced by this research. And what you find is an interesting explanation, which is if you look at individual earnings rather than household income, girls growing up here in the Bay Area do extremely well. However, when you look at household income, they don't do so well. And that's because they're much, much less likely to be married than if they grew up somewhere else. So if you're in your mid-30s, only something like a quarter or less of girls growing up in the barrier are married. And we show in our paper that every extra year you spend up growing up in the Bay Area, you're less likely to get married. So I remember telling my wife, you know, I don't think we need to worry. Our daughter will be fine in terms of earnings. It's just that she might not be married if we move to California.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Related to things like marriage pattern, so relating this back to personal experience, I remember when working on these issues and thinking about our decision to move from Harvard to Stanford at the time, we actually were just expecting our first child a daughter. And I noticed in our data that for kids in affluent families in the Bay Area, daughters tend to have very low household earnings. And I found that kind of curious. And we spent some time trying to dig into why that was partly given my personal interest in the issue.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that's a very interesting question. We find sharp differences in outcomes by gender across areas for various reasons. So let me give you a couple of examples. So one, we find that areas with more concentrated poverty. So take the city of Baltimore, for example. We find very poor outcomes for boys in particular relative to girls. And we think that that has to do with crime and getting involved in gangs and so forth, things that girls just are less likely to do. And so as a result, growing up in a place like Baltimore turns out to be extremely detrimental for boys. We estimate that you lose something like 30% of your earnings relative to if you'd grown up in an average place in America. Whereas for girls, it's slightly negative, but not nearly as bad. There are a set of kind of urban ghettos, you know, places with concentrated poverty that tend to have particularly negative outcomes for boys. There are also other phenomena that are more”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In relative mobility, in light of all those major social investments, from that perspective, it's actually surprising that things haven't improved, right? So my view is you've got these two countervailing sets of trends, and that's left us at kind of a standstill in terms of relative mobility. However, in our more recent work, we show that absolute mobility, your chance of doing better than your parents, which arguably is what people really think of as the American dream, that has fallen grammatically over the past.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think our numbers are right. I think the fact is that relative intergenerational mobility, by that I mean your chances of moving up or down in the ranks in terms of percentiles. Right. Has not changed significantly over the past forty years or something like that. That is, if you're born to parents in the bottom 20%, your odds of making it to the middle class or to the top 20% look roughly the same today as they did 30, 40 years ago. Now, why is that the case? I think Bob correctly points out that there are lots of trends going in a direction that might have led you to think that this would be getting worse over time. So for instance, he shows in his work that the richer investing more in their children's education, spending more time reading to their kids, for example, relative to kids from lower income families. But you also have to remember that at the same time over the past 50 years, we've been fighting the war on poverty, right, and investing more in kids from lower income backgrounds trying to expand access to higher education, expanding preschool programs, head start, and so forth. So the fact that you don't see any change”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The place. Our sense, we don't have definitive evidence on this, and we're working on trying to establish clearer evidence, but our sense is that integration, actual contact with people from other backgrounds is a strong predictor and likely a causal determinant of kids' long-term outcome. So I suspect that that's one major factor in what's going on.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the strong correlates we find is that places that are more integrated across socioeconomic groups that have lower segregation tend to have better outcomes for kids. And that kind of thing in a rural area, you can see why that occurs and why it might lead to better outcomes. So if you live in a big city, it's very easy to self-segregate in various ways. You live in a gated community, you send your kids to a private school, you essentially don't interact with people from different socioeconomic classes. If you live in a small town in Iowa, pretty much there's one place your kids are going to go to school. There's one kind of set of activities that you can all participate in. And that, I think, is likely to lead to more integration.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think a striking example of that is states in the middle of the US like Iowa, for example, which historical data going back to work by Claudia Golden, Larry Katz, has always looked like a place with very good outcomes for kids and lower income families. And what's amazing about that is Iowa suffers from kind of a brain drain phenomenon where the most successful people often end up leaving the state, going to Chicago, going to New York to get higher paying jobs. Yet generation after generation, Iowa seems to produce very good outcomes for low income families. So that again suggests it's not about natural resources or temporary booms. It's something more persistent.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tend to be quite persistent over time. It's not like the places that have high upward mobility. In one decade suddenly have very low upward mobility in the next decade. It's a pretty persistent phenomenon.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so some of what drives upward mobility, of course, is just having a very vibrant economy. So to give you an example, parts of North Dakota with the natural resource boom there we see is having very high upward mobility. Of course, if you discover natural resources, that's going to help more people move up the income distribution. But by and large, that is the exception rather than the key driver of the difference as an upward mobility that we find across places. And I say that for a couple of reasons. First, even if you hold fix the rate of growth, the rate of economic growth, you find that some places have much higher rates of upper mobility than others. So to give you an example, Atlanta is a city that's booming in terms of jobs and economic growth overall. But Atlanta is one of the places with the lowest levels of upward mobility for kids growing up in low-income families there. The second thing you see is these rates of upward mobility to the extent we have data.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I've found on the whole Americans to be very interested in Indian culture and to be very welcoming. And I guess that's the experience I've had. I know other people have had different experiences, but to me, that's the main thing I think of.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a bunch of books that I think broadly focus on integration of Indians in Western society and what that entails and how different is America from India. I think what speaks to me is that there are obviously quite significant differences between the two cultures, but the experience I've had is that America has been an incredibly welcoming place since I was a kid. When I first came to the United States, it took some time to adjust as it would for any child coming from a completely different background.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it could be. I mean, the name that comes to mind most prominently is Ramanujan, the man who knew infinity. And I think that type of thinking. Is maybe encouraged. Once you have kind of a tradition of people in that vein, I remember hearing a lot about Ramanujan, you know, since I was a little kid. And so you look up to that kind of thing and maybe that influences subsequent generations of children as well. I think that kind of mechanism is actually extremely important in terms of what children choose to do”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the South. I think most Westerners' perception of India is based on North India. Taj Mahal Delhi, Agra, so forth. But going to places in Tamil Nadu, going to places in Karnataka, increasingly, if you think about Silicon Valley, the corresponding place in India is in Hyderabad and the tech sector there. If I were to pick a specific place, the area where I'm from, there's a city called Motheray in Tamil Nadu, which is a typical Tamilian city. And you kind of get, I think, a very different feel for what India is relative to what you'd see in Delhi. And I think what is striking is that India is really like a combination of many different countries with completely distinct languages, completely different food, culture, and customs and so forth. And so what I would suggest is visiting at least two or three different states so you can see the diversity.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many Tamil preparations of okra. It's a popular dish, and supposedly it's supposed to make you smarter. So I had a lot of okra when I was a kid trying to get that.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated Checklists, I think, are incredibly useful to stay organized and solve complex problems. I think you need the way to make progress on complex research problems, for example, is to divide them into smaller manageable problems and then go down a list and solve that checklist.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About Salt Lake City, Utah is maybe not a place you'd think of as the having the most vibrant economy and so forth, but it's a terrific place for upward mobility. It always shows up in the top of our data in terms of rates of upward mobility, health outcomes, lots of different dimensions. Maybe it makes sense exposed when you think about things like the community and the Mormon church and so forth, but certainly ex ante going into it, if you would ask me, where do you think the place with the highest upward mobility is going to be, I would not have said, you talked?”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there tends to be very little variety in what those movies are about, at least traditionally. That is their, you know, it's typically about somebody about marriage. That's what a lot of these movies revolve around. And arranged marriages and kids not wanting to have a particular arranged marriage and then ending up in a different situation. There's a kind of a recipe to a lot of those movies.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What about it speaks to me? I think just the combination of Eastern and Western influences on music. Where there's more of a beat, basically, in Western music than in traditional Tamil and Karnatak music. And Ara Rachman really was the person who saw how to bring those together.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say underrated I think he's had a huge influence on Indian music and bringing it to the Western world in particular. And I think I like his music very much.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no way because I'm going to do biomedical science. This teacher clearly doesn't know my interests. And I look back upon that and think, wow, he must have thought that I would be good at economics or interested in economics or something.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember in high school being influenced by a number of teachers, one anecdote that comes to mind off the top of my head in the context of this conversation is a history teacher I had who taught an economics class in my high school. And he said, you know, Raj, one day you're going to be on the Federal Reserve Board. And I remember thinking to myself,”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, but that's why I was emphasizing the upper tail. I'm not convinced we can actually identify these children in terms of their potential outcomes at a very early age with a great deal of accuracy. I think there's some predictive power. You can explain maybe a quarter of the variation that you'd see in adulthood with early childhood test scores and things like that. There's certainly strong predictors, but by no means are they kind of, they don't tell you your fate. There's lots of variation even conditional on how well you're doing early in childhood. And so I think it's important to recognize that and not kind of condemn people to different tracks purely based on how they're doing it at the earliest stages. Again, with the possible exception of kids in the upper tail, where I think it requires a lot of investment to get children to the point where they're going to be highly productive members of society having positive spillovers on others. And so there's a rash.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My feelings too much tracking at an early age is detrimental because children bounce around, test score measures are imperfect, there's no way you can perfectly gauge a person's trajectory at a very young age. However, I think there are some exceptions to that. So at the very upper end of the distribution, gifted and talented programs. I think there's good evidence suggesting that they can be extremely effective in promoting those kids. Learning and getting them on a path to be kind of the superstars in the economy who are starting the new companies, discovering the new drugs.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think status seems incredibly important. My sense of the K through 12 education system in the US is unfortunately for many kids graduating from top colleges, teaching is not near the top of the list of professions that they'd consider. And I think it's partly because, in a sense, they can't afford to be teachers because it entails such a pay cut, but also because they feel that it's not the most prestigious career to pursue. So one example of that that I think illustrates that point is take the Teach for America program. Teach for America is incredibly successful in getting very talented kids to go into teaching, at least for a short time. I think the issue with Teach for America is those kids tend not to stay in teaching after a couple of years. Now, what I think is striking about Teacher for America is I think the reason it's so effective in attracting top talent is precisely because it's very difficult to get into Teach for America. I think kids at top institutions like to do things that are hard to do, basically.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think eventually it's conceivable that you move up the quality ladder. And so you've got everybody getting a very good primary school education, then you need to work on secondary education and so forth. But there again, I would say there are lots of bargains to be found in our most recent work looking at colleges and upward mobility. We see that there are a number of colleges where kids seem to be doing extremely well that are not all that expensive. Also, I think here a macroeconomic perspective is useful. If you look at countries that have some of the best educational outcomes, like Scandinavian countries, they're not actually spending dramatically more than the United States. So at some abstract level, I think that logic has to be right, that eventually in order to raise the level of education beyond some point, we're going to have to spend more and more on that. But I don't think we're close enough empirically to such a point that that is really a critical concern.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so because I think while in some limiting case that might end up being true, at the moment I see so many opportunities within the US K-12 education system to potentially have significantly higher productivity without dramatically higher costs. So let me give you an example. coming back to the case of teachers My sense is if we were to try to keep the most effective teachers in the classroom and either retrain or dismiss the teachers who are less effective, we could substantially increase productivity without significantly increasing costs.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, to me, the most convincing piece of evidence along those lines is studies of adopted kids, actually, which directly try to assess the effects of environments. less a fan of the twin studies because I feel like you don't have a clear sense of why one twin ends up in a certain condition versus another twin. You don't have an experiment there. You don't know what's driving that variation. In contrast, there's some very nice work by Bruce Sasserdote, an economist at Dartmouth, looking at Korean adoptee kids who were effectively randomly assigned to families because of quirks and ordering of families' applications and so forth. And he shows, I think, very convincing evidence that if you happen to be an adopted kid who ends up in a family that's more educated, more affluent, so forth, you do substantially better in adulthood than if you end up randomly assigned to a less educated, less affluent family living in a worse neighborhood. So I think that's really clear evidence that”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a number of twin studies which show that there are significant differences in kids' outcomes depending upon the conditions in which they were raised.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and so that also might reflect the earlier finding where we find that teachers who had 10 or more years of experience seem to be better teachers. They're also coming from an earlier cohort, right, relative to the teachers who have less experience who are becoming teachers more recently. And so one of the things you see from other research is some evidence that the quality of teachers in earlier cohorts where women were more likely to go into teaching high-skilled women was much higher. So I think that's plausible.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, actually. So I think paying teachers who are more experienced. The current system of pay essentially is a function of entirely of experience. So the more experience you have, if you have five years or seven years or ten years or 15 years, your pay continuously goes up. Your pay does not depend in any way on any measure of performance. And so as I was saying earlier, while experience is one predictor of teachers' impacts in a way, a much more important predictor are these value added or other types of measures of performance. I think tying pay or bonuses or efforts to retain teachers to performance measures, whether they're test score-based value added measures or principal ratings or something else, is quite sensible. And that is not something that's currently done in most U.S. school systems.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me clarify there. That is in fact in a subsequent study, that's actually the pattern you see in the data. So it's the first couple of years of experience that matter the most. So novice teachers don't do as well as slightly more experienced teachers. But then you see essentially a flat profile. The above below 10 that you're referring to in this earlier kindergarten star paper was just a simple 50-50 split of the data, which when you have a smaller data set when you're running an experiment, that's the most natural way to maximize statistical power and split the data. In a subsequent study where we study all children in New York City school district and we have two and a half million observations instead of 12,000, you start to see that it is indeed the first two years that matter the most.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sit still, you know, various non cognitive measures. And you see that if you were in a better kindergarten classroom, you're doing better on all of those non-cognitive dimensions, even though your academic performance is no longer better. So that is suggestive evidence that that's the type of mechanism that matters here”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that does. So, you know, in something like discipline, that seems a little bit odd, but take social skills, for example. So suppose the kindergarten teacher helps you get a higher test score in kindergarten, but in the process of doing so, she's also a teacher who's able to manage the classroom effectively and help kids get along with each other. All right. So now getting along with somebody else is probably quite valuable in the labor market. However, it's not necessarily going to have a direct payoff in terms of helping you do better on your third grade test. Now, this is a bit of conjecture. I don't know whether that's exactly the mechanism, but what I can tell you is what does seem to persist are these gains in terms of students' non-cognitive skills. So there are subsequent surveys, which in the context of the study we did of 12,000 kids in Tennessee, they assessed these children's ability to get along with other kids, their ability.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the teacher is not teaching you skills that end up showing up on later tests. So it's not so much that they're teaching you how to do math better or teaching you trigonometry or something in later grades. Rather, it's that they are teaching you things like discipline and social skills and other things that are valued in the labor market directly.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I can add one bit of nuance there. So experience seems to matter, but then the other thing more generally I would say is a strong predictor of teacher qualities, so-called value added measures, which are based on test scores, so teachers' impacts on students test scores, if they raise their students' test scores a lot, we'd call them a high value added teacher. If they reduce their students' test scores on average, we'd call them a low value added teacher. And these value-added measures, along with experience, seem to be pretty strong predictors of students later success. Now, as you noted, what is quite puzzling and surprising about this result is that prior studies in our own work shows that if you look at intermediate outcomes like test scores and later grades, you don't find much of an impact. But the impact reemerges when kids become adults. So, you know, why is it that you see this kind of puzzling pattern of effects that disappear and then reappear in adulthood?”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're paying more tax than you need to. I do think you can explain it though by temporary needs for cash, which make you want to raise equity, but then wanting to have a steady commitment to pay that money back, signaling to shareholders, you know, you're not just trying to collect money in order to invest in some pet project or buy a private jet. You have a commitment to actually delivering a return and paying back the dividends. And what we found in that paper is that the sense in which there's some rationality here is that managers who own a larger fraction of shares and thereby have interests that are more aligned with shareholders, they tend to pay more dividends exactly as you might think.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that kind of forces managers to pay out money, which could be efficient from a shareholder's point of view if you think managers don't have the right incentives.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the existence of dividends itself is a bit of a puzzle in our paper, which shows that changes in tax rates affect the amount of dividends firms pay out doesn't fully address that puzzle. So in particular, the point you're alluding to is that you would think it's more effective to repurchase shares and effectively return money to shareholders or do nothing or do nothing, thereby avoiding the dividend tax and just paying the capital gains tax. In practice, companies pay dividends. There have been explanations put forth, which I think are plausible. For instance, you need to constrain managers the amount of capital managers have on hand because otherwise there's a tendency to empire build and invest in projects that aren't as efficient from the shareholder's perspective as you might otherwise like. And dividends, for some reason, are viewed as kind of a commitment. If I'm going to start paying a dividend, I'm going to keep paying that dividend. If I choose to cut it back, it's usually a negative, very negative signal.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not here in Silicon Valley at least. Yeah, but it could be menu cost kind of more broadly written in the sense of it takes time to think about optimal pricing strategies and re-optimizing that problem every single day, devoting labor to that might not be the efficient thing to do. Could it be about salience? I mean, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think perhaps although I would think the salience model would push you towards wanting to change prices more in some ways, because if consumers aren't paying attention, in essence, you're facing an inelastic demand curve in the short run. And so you might want to catch them by surprise and occasionally have higher prices or lower prices. I actually think sales have a lot to do with salience. If you think about all those tags you see at the store, it's not so much the dollar price reduction. It's the fact that the thing says it's on sale, I think, that attracts people's attention and makes them want to buy.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's pretty good evidence that companies don't change their nominal prices that often. Whether that's literally because of menu costs or some other sort of inertia, I don't know, but I think that evidence.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I don't think sale taxes are the only attribute that are shrouded. There are plenty of other fees you pay. For example, think about airline fees or cell phone fees. Often there will be a set of surcharges that you pay after the initial quoted price or when you're renting a car or when you're looking at hotel room prices. And so sales taxes are, I think, one of many examples like that. you know, companies not wanting to include the sales tax is just an example of how they don't want to include other prices as well. Another classic example is printers and the toner cartridges. You make the printer relatively cheap, but the toner cartridges quite expensive.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simpler than an income tax, for example. Are people even reacting rationally, so to speak, to the sales tax? And you end up finding that they're not?”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think producers correctly recognize companies recognize that when the tax is added at the end, it's in their favor because consumers don't cut back on demand as much as if the tax was included in the price. And that would force companies to basically cut prices and bear some of the costs of the tax. So, you know, this paper, coming back to your earlier question, the way I started thinking about it is just walking around in the real world, if you think about how people react to taxes. Economists like to make the assumption that everybody pays attention to every tax in the economy. And my sense from just having conversations with friends is that in fact people have no idea on a day-to-day basis about what the tax rates are actually paying are. And so I thought about, okay, how can we take that disconnect and just ask in the simplest possible context a sales tax? What could be simpler than that?”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, the supplier is definitely favor the add on. I mean, I think the nature of the value added tax in Europe, which is levied at various parts of the production process, makes it a little bit more difficult or cumbersome to levy the tax as an add-on at the end. It's not that you can't do it, but just when you think about the mechanics of it, it's more natural to build it in along the way. In the US, we have a sales tax as opposed to a value-added tax. So you can see why it might be natural to just add it at the end.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source