Dr. Chen’s research on topics in higher education, wage inequality, and health links her work to that of other population researchers associated with the Center. The signature to her contributions in these areas is a sophisticated use of econometric approaches. For instance, in a recent working paper, “Does College Teach Young Men to Smoke Pot?,” which she presented as a CSDA colloquium, she empirically addresses the relationship between education and health, measuring the latter through marijuana use. The paper’s key contribution is to model with an instrumental-variable strategy the complex causation linking education to health in this case, since college education may, on the one hand, improve health-related behaviors and, on the other, increase marijuana use. The findings, based on an analysis of NLSY data, show a large, positive effect of college attendance on marijuana use, in contradiction to the widely assumed health benefits of advanced education.
Another example of her approach can be found in her co-authored paper on “Estimating causal effects of education on wage inequality,” which is being revised for the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. Chen and her co-author propose the use of instrumental variables and semi-parametric estimators to solve the problem of selection bias in comparisons of wage inequality across schooling groups. This tack provides a flexible scheme for the identification of (conditional) average treatment effects on various inequality measures including conditional variance and interquartile spreads. After using simulations to demonstrate that their estimators perform well in finite samples, the researchers employ college proximity as an instrument for schooling and find little evidence that college education increased the degree of wage inequality in the NLSYM data.
Dr. Chen is Co-PI on an NSF grant, “New Instrumental-Variables Estimates of the Effects of Schooling and Military Services: Empirical Strategies Using Non-Public-Use Data,” which continues her research on ways of estimating the effects of education. In addition to examining the effect of schooling on wage inequality, the project, which will exploit the possibilities of record linkage possible at a Census Bureau Research Data Center, will estimate the effects of education on fertility and of Vietnam-era military service on earnings, labor-force status, and disability.
In addition to her work on her NSF-funded project, she will the risk-sharing behavior within Chinese extended families using a new established Chinese/Taiwanese panel data set. In addition, using Taiwanese and British data sets, she studies the impact of college education on productivity risk and employment risk for different countries, important to understanding the role of education in earnings and hiring cross nationally.
Contribution to the
population research program
Dr. Chen’s expertise in economics and econometrics broadens the methodological spectrum of the Center. Her work on education, in combination with that of Schiller, Lankford, Wycoff and others, enables the Center’s researchers to engage in more and higher quality research on educational opportunities and consequences, topics highly relevant to the overall theme of vulnerable populations. In addition, her current work on Chinese extended families complements that of other researchers in the Urban China Research Network.
Dr. Chen makes use of the computing infrastructure and statistical consultation provided by CSDA to help accomplish her computationally intensive research goals. She will draw on the participation of the Center in the NYCRDC for help in accessing the resources there.