Joshua Angrist

Joshua David Angrist is an professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an affiliated professor of economics at Hebrew University. He has been teaching economics since 1989, when he was an assistant professor in economics at Harvard University. Angrist is best known for his use of instrumental variable estimates in his works which often involve factors in and effects of student education, labor markets, immigration, military service, and econometrics. A family man, Angrist currently resides in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Background

Joshua Angrist began his college at Oberlin College in Oberlin Ohio. Here he was given "highest honors" and received his bachelor of arts in economics in June 1982. From here, he would move to Princeton, New Jersey to pursue a master of arts in economics at Princeton University, graduating in 1987. Two years later (1989), he would receive his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University.

Teacher

Professor Angrist is currently employed by the Department of Economics at MIT, where he currently teaches classes in econometrics, labor economics, and public policy. He is also a current affiliated professor of economics at Hebrew University, and has been since 2003. From 1996 until 1998, Angrist was an associate professor at MIT. Before that he had stints as an assistant professor at Harvard (1989-1991), as a visiting associate professor at MIT (1994-1995), and as a senior lecturer at Hebrew University(1991-1995), all in the field of economics. Rumor has it that Angrist does not enjoy traveling, but this has not yet deterred him from teaching courses, holding workshops, and giving lectures in Israel, Switzerland, Denmark, China, Sweden, Colombia, England, and most commonly within the borders of the United States.

Researcher

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) added Angrist as a research fellow in 1989 and later promoted to him research associate in 1994. He is also a current research fellow for the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and has been since 2000. Much of Angrist’s research has resulted in his numerous works including over sixty original working papers, over thirty-five journal articles, and a book chapter.

His works in the year of 2007 are three original working papers: "Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial", "The Effect of High-Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Group-Randomized Trial", and "Long-term consequences of Vietnam-era conscription: schooling, experience, and earnings".

In "Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial", Angrist used a randomized field experiment at a Canadian college to help understand the effects of services (peer advising and organized study groups) and incentives (scholarships for good first-year grades) on the grades and other measures of academic performance in college. The conclusions were that a combination of both services and incentives in the first year will increase the production of women on a long-term basis, even beyond the year their scholarship has expired. The combination also proved to play a larger role with women that either services of incentives alone. This study also finds that neither services nor incentives will have any effect on the average college male’s academic performance.

In "The Effect of High-Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Group-Randomized Trial", Angrist takes a similar approach as in "Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial" to investigate whether or not incentives, services, or a combination of both will raise academic achievement for high school men and women in Israel. In Israel, Angrist explains that performance on the Bagrut examination is especially important in qualifying for post-secondary schooling. So, he paid special attention to how services and incentives affected young men and women on this examination. In the end, Angrist concludes that both incentives and services improve academic performance in women, but make no statistically significant improvement for men’s academic performance.

"Long-term consequences of Vietnam-era conscription: schooling, experience, and earnings" explains how factors such as the GI Bill have helped Vietnam veterans reduce their earnings losses from service to near zero by the year 2000. Angrist explains that this is a change from the 1970’s and 1980’s when (on average) Vietnam veterans had experienced earnings losses.

Angrist has also published "Is Spanish-Only Schooling Responsible for the Puerto Rican Language Gap?" in the year of 2007.

"Is Spanish-Only Schooling Responsible for the Puerto Rican Language Gap?" makes a conclusion that opposes U.S. policymakers’ stand on the best way to raise English proficiency in countries where English is not the primary language. Angrist’s experiment uses data from Puerto Rican students who had been instructed in English in their post-primary schools (as was Puerto Rican policy prior to 1949) and those who had been instructed in Spanish throughout their schooling years in Puerto Rico (1949 and after). Surprisingly, the Puerto Rican students who were instructed in English did not have a (statistically significant) higher English proficiency than those who had been instructed only in Spanish.

Two other works "Rural Windfall or a New Resource Curse? Coca, Income and Civil Conflict in Colombia" and "Does Teacher Testing Raise Teacher Quality? Evidence from State Certification Requirements" are scheduled to be published in 2008.

In "Rural Windfall or a New Resource Curse? Coca, Income and Civil Conflict in Colombia", Angrist attempts to address the problem of violence and civil war in places where black market goods are produced. He uses Colombia and the coca plant as an example. His conclusions are that black market goods, such as the coca plant being grown in rural Colombia, are potentially very profitable to the regions producing it. However, Angrist concludes that violence gets in the way of almost all potential economic gains and growth. Therefore, the production of black market goods is never as profitable to producers as the prices paid for the goods would indicate.

In "Does Teacher Testing Raise Teacher Quality? Evidence from State Certification Requirements", Professor Angrist set out to analyze if it were possible to raise teacher quality by implementing a new test and stricter certifications. Unfortunately, evidence led Angrist to conclude that the quality of teaching stayed the same, while the new requirements instead only raised the salary of the teachers who passed. The new certifications also hurt the Hispanic teaching population because these were the teachers who struggled the most to fulfill the requirements.

Editor

Professor Angrist has been serving as an editor for economics and statistics journals since 1992. He currently serves on the board of editors for "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics". He has also edited for the "American Economic Review", the "Journal of Labor Economics", "Labour Economics", "Econometrica", "Economics Letters", and the "Journal of Business and Economic Statistics".

Other Notable Work

Professor Angrist has history as a successful consultant to the national governments of two different countries: the United States and Israel. In this position he was noted for offering each government insight about the workings of labor markets.

Resources

(1) http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/angrist/index.htm

(2) http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/1525

(3) http://ideas.repec.org/e/pan29.html

(4) http://www.iza.org/index_html?lang=en&mainframe=http%3A//www.iza.org/iza/en/webcontent/personnel/photos/index_html%3Fkey%3D48&topSelect=personnel&subSelect=fellows

(5) http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pan29.htm

Angrist, Joshua David (1989) Econometric analysis of the Vietnam Era draft lottery. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, United States -- New Jersey.