Carly Robinson

 

For this post, I interviewed Carly Robinson about her paper “The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards.” Carly is a PhD candidate in Education at Harvard University. In her research, she focuses on experimentally testing specific measures that can be taken to improve students’ educational outcomes.

This paper is co-authored with Jana Gallus, Monica Lee, and Todd Rogers. The award that this paper looks at is one given to middle and high school students in California for excellent attendance. Several studies have shown that students with better attendance perform better in school. In many states, average daily attendance rates are also a determinant of funding for school districts. So, schools might be motivated to increase attendance for both of these reasons. 

The standard intuition that most of us have for awards more generally is that once someone receives one for an accomplishment, we would expect them to continue to strive to achieve in that realm.  In fact, in California, the government has encouraged schools to recognize students for good attendance. These authors wanted to see how effective different types of rewards were in encouraging good attendance after the announcement of the award. So, they conducted a field experiment. A field experiment is like an experiment in the lab, but it’s done out in the real world. These researchers conducted their experiment on more than 15,000 middle and high school students in California. There were three groups of students: one group didn’t get an award (the control group), one group was told that they had the chance to earn an award for having perfect attendance in February (a prospective award for their future behavior), and one earned a retrospective award for already having perfect attendance in a previous month. The retrospective award was an unannounced, surprise award.   

The researchers expected both award groups to have better attendance than the control group. But what they found was that those students who received the surprise, retrospective award missed 8% more days of school in February than those who did not receive an award. And the attendance of the students who had a chance to earn an award in February – the prospective group – was no different than that of the control group in that month. But in March their attendance decreased. So, both types of awards actually led to reduced attendance after the award period was over.

So, what’s happening here? The researchers think that, once students earn an award, they believe that  they have at least met, and likely surpassed what’s expected of them, and so they feel licensed to miss school going forward. And, interestingly, the researchers also find that academically low performing students have more absences after the award period than their high performing peers. Since these students are probably least likely to enjoy school, they may use having earned the attendance award to negotiate missing more school going forward. 

So, our standard intuition, and California’s recommendations, don’t appear to be working as intended! And, just in case you think that you should have known better: the researchers surveyed teachers and administrators; and only 2% of them predicted that an award would reduce attendance after the award period. 

I asked Carly what recommendations she has for improving school attendance, since awards don’t seem to work.  First, she pointed out that one reason these awards might not work is that good attendance is something that students should be doing all the time, and it is therefore not really award-worthy. A better way to reduce absences is to keep parents informed. Carly says that parents chronically underestimate their children’s absences. In this paper, you can see the results of another field experiment in which Carly and her coauthors gave parents real time information about the number of days their children had missed. As a result, attendance did improve.  

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.

Joseph Hotz

                                                     

For this post, I interviewed Professor Joseph Hotz. He is the Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics at Duke University. He is a labor economist who specializes in the economics of the family. His research spans the entire life cycle of the family, including the relationships between parents and children at various stages of their development.  

I interviewed Professor Hotz about his paper, “The Impact of Regulations on the Supply and Quality of Care in Child Care Markets.” In this paper, Professor Hotz and his coauthor, Professor Mo Xiao, seek to investigate the effects of policies that are designed to improve the quality of child care in the U.S.   

Child care centers are regulated at the state level. The regulations are mostly focused on insuring the welfare of children in the centers. They include: (1) maximum child to staff ratios, which vary by age of child; (2) maximum group size; and (3) educational requirements of staff. They also might include other rules like background checks for the staff, and some requirements for safety like equipment checks. But these authors focus on the three that I’ve enumerated, which are widely adopted by states. The specificity of the regulations, and their severity, vary by state.

There are also two types of centers: center-based, and home-based or family-based. The home-based centers tend to be smaller, and less stringently regulated. Developmental psychologists generally agree that center-based care is of higher quality, in terms of educational enrichment, than home-based care. 

The authors have detailed data about both types of child care centers in all 50 states, over the period from 1987 to 1997. And, it turns out that there are some interesting unintended consequences of the regulations. For one, the authors find that states that have more stringently regulated center-based care have fewer of these centers; and in particular it is low income neighborhoods that lose these centers, as compared to high income neighborhoods. Families tend to find care close to home, so it seems that these regulations, designed to ensure that centers are developmentally enriching, instead limit access to them; and more so for the families that might need them the most. In fact, as an example, if the average child to staff ratio (7.5) is imposed in low income child care markets, the number of centers would fall by 10%, whereas this requirement would lead to an increase of 8.7% in the number of centers in high income neighborhoods. Further, with fewer center-based care options, these low income children end up in family-based centers, in what is generally considered lower quality care.

There is some good news. The regulations seem to be working: the centers that do remain as a result of these stringent regulations tend to be of higher quality. However, again, these centers tend to be located in high income neighborhoods. So, overall, high income families are the ones benefiting from this care. All in all, it seems that high income families benefit from these regulations, while low income families might struggle to gain access to the best quality centers.  

I asked Professor Hotz if there would be a better way to design child care regulations, to avoid these negative unintended consequences. He told me that he believes that subsidies to low income households should be the focus. Such subsidies do exist, but the emphasis has often been on the parents, with the goal of helping a parent, usually a mother, get off of welfare and into work. The subsidy will get a child into daycare, but with less attention paid to the quality of the care. He argues that the focus should be on the child. For example, it should not be a requirement that the mother must work in order to receive the subsidy. Developmental psychologists have made some headway on this issue, and it’s made some progress in Congress. But it has not gotten off the ground yet.  

I asked Professor Hotz about some of his other recent work. In this paper, he and his coauthors are studying families with stepkin. They are interested in learning about how much time stepparents spend with their adult stepchildren, and how much time adult children spend with their elderly stepparents. 

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.

Jenna Stearns

For this post, I interviewed Professor Jenna Stearns, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. She is a labor economist; and her research is centered on understanding what she calls “family-friendly” policies in the workplace.  She is particularly interested in how they change the decisions women make about their employment, their family structure, and their health.

In “Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?,”  Professor Stearns and two co-authors, Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard, look at an example of a family-friendly policy that I myself, as an academic, have taken advantage of: stopping the tenure clock after childbirth or adoption. So, I was naturally drawn to this research. Most of you probably don’t know how this detail of the tenure system works in the academic world. This is a policy that allows assistant professors to extend the time until they come up for tenure, typically by a year. Initially, colleges and universities created these policies only for women, to “level the playing field.” That is, to try to help make up for the time women spend away from work after childbirth. But now it is most common for these policies to be gender-neutral, so that both new mothers and new fathers can take advantage of them, usually a maximum of twice before tenure time.

In this paper, the authors study the effects of these policies only at the top 50 Economics departments in the United States. They have data on over 1300 assistant professors hired in these departments between 1980 and 2005. They can’t tell exactly who took advantage of this program, but this is where the power of statistical analysis comes in. By separating out the various characteristics of the professors and the universities, they can estimate the effects the policy has had, and on whom.

The news is disheartening for women, but could be worse. They find that males at an institution with a gender-neutral clock stopping policy have about a 17% higher probability of getting tenure than they would have had before their institution adopted a clock stopping policy. On the other hand, women are about 19% LESS likely to get tenure after their institution adopts the policy. However, while tenure rates do fall for women at these top 50 institutions, the evidence shows that these women do go on to get tenure at other, sometimes, lower ranked institutions. What seems to be happening is that at the most prestigious institutions, the clock stopping policy allows men time to produce additional publications in the top 5 journals in Economics. On the other hand, women are not able to increase their publications in these journals. At these institutions, publishing in these journals is key to earning tenure. 

I think this research is important because it adds something new to the evidence on why women are not able to make it to the top of their professions. However, Professor Stearns is careful to point out that these results may be somewhat specific to Economics as a discipline. In Economics, especially at the most prestigious institutions, publishing in the top 5 journals is important for earning tenure, and it can take a long time to get these papers published. Hence, the one-year extension of the tenure clock early on in their career is very valuable for assistant professors in these departments, if it helps them get their research into these outlets. The gender-neutral clock stopping policy may not prove to be detrimental to women in other fields. 

I asked Professor Stearns how she thinks these policies should be designed differently, now that we know they are not working the way they were intended. The thing is, one of the reasons tenure clock stopping policies have changed from female-only to gender-neutral is because of the stigma associated with taking time off at childbirth: women feared that they were being perceived as less committed to their careers under the female-only version. But Professor Stearns believes that this work shows that the policies need to take into account that it is women who generally bear most of the burden of childcare; and that any policy should be designed to help encourage men to prioritize childcare -- during the tenure clock stopping, and in general. She suggests that the benefit can perhaps be available for both males and females, but be more generous for females. 

I wondered whether this work has implications outside the world of academia. Professor Stearns mentioned law firms, where young lawyers come up for partner, in a similar way that assistant professors come up for tenure. They have one shot at it, early on, so policies like this could be similarly effective (or not?!) in the law profession. I am very curious about the potential implications for enacting family-friendly policies likes this more widely in the business world, and maybe even in other professions. 

I asked Professor Stearns about some of her other research. She is currently working on a project that looks at the effects of different types of maternity leaves. So this work is specifically about policies designed only for women who take time off after childbirth. While some of these provide mothers with an income stream, others instead ensure that their jobs will be waiting for them. Her preliminary findings are that the latter types of policies work better to keep women in their jobs in the long run. 

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.