Title: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms

Authors: Chiaki Moriguchi, Yusuke Narita, Mari Tanaka
Abstract: What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. Compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system admitted more high-achievers and produced more occupational elites (such as top income earners) decades later in the labor market. This gain came at a distributional cost, however. Meritocratic centralization also increased the number of urban-born elites relative to rural-born ones, undermining equal access to higher education and career advancement.

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Title: The Social Learning Barrier

Abstract: We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors’ actions in the previous period before taking an action herself. Our main result shows that the learning rate of the slowest learning agent is bounded independently of the network size and structure and the agents’ strategies. This extends recent findings on equilibrium learning by demonstrating that the limitation stems from an inherent tradeoff between optimal action choices and information revelation, rather than strategic considerations. We complement this result by showing that a social planner can design strategies for which each agent learns faster than an isolated individual, provided the network is sufficiently large and strongly connected.

Link: http://brandlf.com/docs/network-learning.pdf

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Title: The Social Construction of Race after Emancipation: US Census Racial Assignment Based on Skin Tone, Wealth, and Literacy (joint with Anjali Adukia and Daniel Keniston)

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Title: Set-valued control functionsLink opens in a new window(with Sukjin Han)

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Title: Self-Control and Attending Class

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