stream Office hours: Sign up here, 530 Evans Hall #3880, Berkeley, California Berkeley - School of Law View profile . Christopher Walters joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor in 2013 after completing a PhD in economics at MIT. What made you decide on labor economics as your focus? Copyright 2015 UC Regents. (Economics, Statistics), University of California, San Diego M.A. Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/briefing/universal-pre-k-biden-agenda.html, Tagged: Chris Walters, Education & Child Development, Child and Family Economic Security, University of California, Berkeley207 Giannini HallBerkeley, CA 94720, Email: info.olab@berkeley.eduPhone: 510-642-4361Support O-LabSubscribe to our newsletter, Hilary Hoynes featured in Ezra Klein column: What the Rich Don't Want to Admit About the Poor, Emmanuel Saez: California Should Pass a Small Tax on Big Wealth. Employers, Labor by Design: Contributions of David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens, The Causal Interpretation of Two-Stage Least Squares with Multiple Instrumental Variables, Reasonable Doubt: Experimental Detection of Job-Level Employment Discrimination, Can Successful Schools Replicate? Time and place: Mar. Im not sure all economists would agree with me, but I think our best evidence suggests theres actually pretty large returns to human capital investment at all different stages of the educational career, including the college attendance decision. That appealed to me as someone who had a little bit more math that I felt like I wasnt able to use in my history classes, so I just started taking more and went from there. The study showed that winners of the pre-school lottery in Boston had lower incarceration rates and higher rates of college enrollment, although evidence for better test scores was mixed. Berkeley Opportunity Lab, University of California, Berkeley , Berkeley, CA, U.S.A. That question is premised on the idea that the return on human capital investment is largest in the early years of schooling. Benefits from KIPP? I always kind of knew I liked school, so I knew I was probably going to go to grad school or something, but I didnt know exactly what. Source: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57a3c0fcd482e9189b09e101/t/63123d116c98c17ed44547cf/1662139669658/PowerOfPreK_InBrief.pdf, Tagged: Chris Walters, Child and Family Economic Security, Education & Child Development. Box PBA 237 Office - P.O. : What inspired you to research into school choice and charter schools? Were interested in developing methods that can actually be used in real datasets to answer important policy questions, and I was attracted to those methods as well, in addition to the questions. 3 0 obj So the combination of being attracted to the experimentalist, clean, and causal identification you get from lotteries with the opportunity to model peoples choices with the administrative data on who is and is not applying and what their backgrounds look like, is what led me to my work on that topic. Science, Augmenting State Capacity for Child Development: Experimental Evidence from India, Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality, Methods for Measuring School Effectiveness, Simple and Credible Value-Added Estimation Using Centralized School Assignment, Policy Evaluation with Multiple Instrumental Variables, The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston, Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. CHRISTOPHER R. WALTERS Department of Economics University of California, Berkeley 530 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Phone: (540) 392-5641 E-mail: crwalters@econ.berkeley.edu Homepage: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~crwalters Employment: A part of that was opportunity. Could you begin by telling me about your background and how it helped shape your academic focus, and what experiences helped you find your passion for economics? Chris Walters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. University of California, Berkeley | College of Letters & Science, School choice; school effectiveness; early childhood interventions, Economics of education; human capital; discrete choice modeling; program evaluation, 530 Evans Hall #3880, Berkeley, California 94720-3880. Your email address will not be published. Berkeley Opportunity Lab, University of California, Berkeley , Berkeley, CA, U.S.A. Voting Rights Equal Economic Progress: The What Caused Racial Disparities in Pollution Is the Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? But I noticed reading those papers and working on a couple early versions of those myself, that there wasnt much analysis in the literature of which people were entering those experiments and why they were. In my graduate classes, readings, and recent work in top journals in this area, I got interested in the combination of choices and experiments that were on the frontier of the education literature. More information >. So I would say the modern applied micro paradigm, especially the way that I was taught in graduate school, is that you need a good experiment to be able to say anything interesting about a social science question. It was a pleasure to interview you. Berkeley, CA 94720, Office: 631E Evans Hall Entry and Choice, Inputs Chris Walters UC Berkeley Economics 244 Applied Econometrics 3277 Introduction from ECON 244 at University of California, Berkeley Were interested in developing methods that can actually be used in real datasets to answer important policy questions, and I was attracted to those methods as well, in addition to the questions. His research focuses on the topics in labor economics and the economics of education, including early childhood programs, school effectiveness, and labor market discrimination. For example, for marginal college students in the United States, in my view, some of the best evidence suggests that the return to a year of college for students at the margin between attending a four-year college and not is something in the order of 10% per year or higher. Dr. Walters received a BA in economics and philosophy from the University of Virginia in 2008 and a PhD in economics from MIT in 2013. I have a few different projects but most of them have that feature, in one way or another. Mailing Address: In 2008, he graduated with a BA in economics and philosophy from the University of Virginia and received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. 94720-3880, University of CW: I think my choice to focus on labor instead of other subfields of economics is a combination of the set of questions you get to answer in labor and the sort of research philosophy of the field, which are linked to each other. PD: We learned in Econ 2, a basic economics class, that the return on investment in human capital decreases as a person progresses through their education. Research brief summarizing work by O-Lab affiliate Christopher Walters (UC Berkeley), Guthrie Gray-Lobe (University of Chicago), and Parag Pathak (MIT). Thank you for your time! x]7}V[:k7%Z,k[3caY` 0yjfUe-28Y|jFomoo8l[UwFm6^q|TK>~|c_/G@w7/hGC Xs/c8~mM$pKB'4 o` SH@d6E8HpqU$#+s7KyEPfM5sRtl|'k8/b@)ZR ~g5j5u6[Y_`"r, -mL{jJ$Noi9Xfk5>S9f3SUSW&|2~fXA|q,?xn}:?Q]Fl[ozoXcC$XY2 "ZR]m"Do{ zB&A02L D8;f#_ {h/g8CP$WIQ^CWjH " X__>0uwj wNOvc-oGJ?J?yk}!` j>ofvx2v]=>mhQ,Kn=zFJ)G# h*c?$_[F]M`KY J(s'5@p!&QQ& U=m1V{|Q<7 G'@!\ Department website Christopher Walters Associate Professor of Economics Christopher Walters joined the economics department as an assistant professor after receiving his PhD in economics from MIT in 2013. Tagged: Chris Walters, Child and Family Economic Security, Education & Child Development Newer Post Perspectives on the Impact of the Expanded Child Tax Credit and the Development of a New Research Agenda on Child and Family Economic Well-Being Older Post New Student Research Builds Evidence on Different Dimensions of Inequality I didnt take any math my first couple of years, but then I sort of happened to take an economics class by chance and I realized it was a way of answering a lot of the same social questions I was interested in studying in a more quantitative way. Posted On : March 6, 2019 Posted By : Posted On : November 26, 2019 Posted By : Posted On : March 23, 2018 Posted By : Copyright 2022 Berkeley Economic Review. The birth date was listed as June 15, 1980. Walters is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) and an affiliate of J-PAL North America. It was a pleasure to interview you. High Schools on College Preparation, Tagged: Education & Child Development, Racial Equity & Economic Opportunity, University of California, Berkeley207 Giannini HallBerkeley, CA 94720, Email: info.olab@berkeley.eduPhone: 510-642-4361Support O-LabSubscribe to our newsletter. Scaling Up Boston's Charter School Sector, On Heckits, LATE, and Numerical Equivalence, The Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-added: Testing and Estimation, Evaluating He received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2012. I have a couple projects on the Head Start program, which is a public preschool program for underprivileged kids in the United States. Study asks why students with more to gain from charter schools are less likely to apply, Berkeley Research Infrastructure Commons (RIC), Intellectual Property & Technology Transfer. -0dq_C b'1@bh1xoFUm|>?6vo-qh;MSWwO!mvy #[_ iC:GtVBrNvB,(^H6k$F2h| oD)^#*?p-#|F1Aa]*~qqOfBE^F+} 0M%AQoc2o |B:uY;TraF"A4eJ@5FJp,Con/fR0$@H"2yHSe_jZ,mo5W_ a8jhRm$Bs$4#"J#Pq8>xgg@Ve}Bh*)10$^O {N_;a8W2@VxkD+aU1C^p_?TAn|B3D`( wQ]]lA%mnON'a)Q{9B2D`6o^. In that strand of my work, Im reanalyzing a large-scale experiment that the Department of Health and Human Services ran on the Head Start program, where people were randomly admitted or not admitted to Head Start. His research focuses on the topics in labor economics and the economics of education, including early childhood programs, school effectiveness, and labor market discrimination. Celles qui sont suivies d'un astrisque (, Sur la base des exigences lies au financement, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5 (4), JD Angrist, SM Dynarski, TJ Kane, PA Pathak, CR Walters, Journal of policy Analysis and Management 31 (4), 837-860, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10 (1), 175-206, JD Angrist, SR Cohodes, SM Dynarski, PA Pathak, CR Walters, Journal of Labor Economics 34 (2), 275-318, A Abdulkadirolu, PA Pathak, J Schellenberg, CR Walters, American Economic Review 110 (5), 1502-39, American Economic Review P&P 100 (2), 239-243, Journal of Political Economy 126 (6), 2179-2223, JD Angrist, PD Hull, PA Pathak, CR Walters, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 132 (2), 871-919, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7 (4), The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137 (4), 1963-2036, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 138 (1), 363-411, American Economic Review 111 (11), 3663-98. Interview with Christopher Walters. Walters is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) and an affiliate of J-PAL North America. I was interested in history and philosophy as an undergrad. And so we like that as social scientists; thats a well-controlled comparison and were confident interpreting the difference between lottery winners and losers as the causal effect of getting into this school and attending this school.