10/7: Ufuk Akcigit

[shevajia]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[mikepackard415]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thanks for sharing your work!

I would be curious to hear about the other policy considerations at play when a government might be making the choice between education and R&D funding, aside from their respective effects on GDP. Is there a moral claim along the lines of "all talent deserves to be recognized and given a chance to develop" that appeals to you? What about some inherent value of innovation that ought to be maximized?

[zbchen0129]

Hi Professor Akcigit! I am impressed with your insights in your paper. And I have a few questions.

1. Your work is focusing on data from Denmark, which is a developed country in Europe. How about some other developing countries? Do you think there will be any difference?
2. You mentioned that an increase in the number of PhD slots is associated with a decline in the average IQ of PhDs. I wonder if this means that the 'Innovation Danmark' program fails or does not reach the expected effect? Are there any advantages that this program brings to the society? Why the government launched this program?

[Yutong0828]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thanks for sharing the work! I am quite interested in the phenomenon of declined IQ due to increased PhD slots. In order to attract more talented and qualified people into the research and development industry, we may need to consider how to attract those who are qualified but do not like research to participate. During this process, what factors other than financial frictions that may come into play? What do you think higher education policy makers could do to help? I'd really love to hear your opinions about this.

Thanks!

[JadeBenson]

Thank you for your interesting work and presenting at our workshop! You discuss how R&D subsidies will likely work best in countries with low income inequality. What would you recommend for a context like the US with high income inequality that's exacerbated at the higher education level by such high education costs?

[NikkiTing]

Thank you for sharing your work, Prof. Akcigit! It's a very comprehensive and interesting piece. As already mentioned by others here, I would also like to know how this would work for emerging and developing economies. I look forward to your presentation!

[william-wei-zhu]

Hi Professor Akcigit, Thank you so much for sharing your work. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the policy implication of this research. Looking forward to your presentation. You will win a Nobel one day!

[siruizhou]

Thank you for joining the workshop. The allocation of education resources is so important to inequality and growth. It's also important to learn the effect in different timeframes. I'm looking forward to your sharing!

[awaidyasin]

Thank you so much Professor for sharing your work with us! I was wondering whether some of your micro-data results concerning aggregate economy (like the effect of R&D subsidies and/or education policy on innovation/patents produced, etc.) do match up with macro evidence from Denmark? Or is there some mismatch between the results derived from your technique and that from a standard empirical macro perspective?

[ttsujikawa]

Thank you very much for presenting your wonderful research outcome! I just want to comment that while educational policy can be measured as the level of educational support in terms of how much government spends on education, I believe that there exists a wide variation of how the government spends on education (e.g. more on elementary education or more on university education). How do you think these difference in educational support affects the result? Thank you!

[yhchou0904]

Thank you for sharing your work with us, Professor Akcigit! I am wondering if the effect of these education-related or R&D-related policies would vary between industries or fields? If they do vary, how would they be like?

[Jasmine97Huang]

Thank you for this interesting paper! I am curious about whether innovation is also a cultural phenomenon that is influenced not only by policy, but also by social events or ideals. Looking forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[Peihan12]

Hello Professor Akcigit, thank you very much for coming here and presenting your research to us. This paper introduces ten very eye-opening and interesting facts to us! I am looking forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[S-Omkar-K]

Dear Professor Akcigit,

Thank you for sharing your work! Also thank you for the detailed mathematical reasoning in the paper.

My question is with respect to the scalability and factoring of this model when exploring something similar to developing countries, especially with high populations.

1. Optimal budget allocation and resource allocation tricks my mind while thinking of scalability of the model to populated countries where there is a skewed distribution of institutions, research opportunities, facilities, great economic disparity and high unemployment. Which of these variables would you take into the equation and how to factor them into the model so as to pick the priority of certain variables over others. Also, how would policy implementation work on such a huge scale?

2. While it is very well demonstrated that an increase in PhD intakes reduce the average IQ/talent level of PhDs. Would the elasticity of IQ/Talent, especially with a high population density constraint/affect the model in any way?

Thank you!

[luckycindyyx]

Thanks so much for sharing such an interesting idea with us! I also had the question of whether IQ could be an effective measurement of talent. It seems to me that both IQ and education, combined, should be instruments of talent. Looking forward to your lecture!

[wanxii]

I'm interested in one of your findings regarding the relationship between education policy and income inequality. It could be an interesting topic if expanding to cross-country analysis.

[xxicheng]

What do you think are the differences between sociologists and economics in viewing inequality?

[y8script]

Thank you for your interesting study! I am wondering to what content can computational analysis give implication to policy makers. How exact can we be when we investigate the effect of a specific policy?

[koichionogi]

Thanks Prof. Akcigit for attending to the workshop and presenting your wonderful research! Your research would definitely provide important insights regarding educational policy/ government investment on human capital, especially when economic inequality has been increasing in many places in the world. One of the natural but really significant takeaways from the research is that government intervention on education, by subsiding higher education to those who otherwise would not have received the education, would improve aggregate human capital. Like other peers I would like to ask how you would design this research in countries with different situations. For example, how would research be with countries with high rate in incoming immigrants or developing economy with more younger generation? Would there be still more incentives for governments to subside educational policy than R&D or other policies? What would be other perspectives we should take consideration of in those cases?

[hsinkengling]

Hi Professor Akcigit Thanks for sharing the paper. I'm really just interested in the thought process behind building the model. As many of my peers echoed, how do you go about first approximating a model of an individual's trajectory and then operationalizing each element? I'm sure some of the operationalizations are standard. What part of this process did you find most challenging?

[XTang685]

Thank you so much for your study Professor Akcigit! It's surprising to see that you incorporated education and innovation into your growth models. Looking forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[hshi420]

I was curious about the policy implication. It should be different in developed countries and developing countries, but could it also be affected by culture and other factors?

[fyzh-git]

Interesting work! Thank you professor Akcigit for sharing the endogenous growth framework. My question is how consistent would the results be when using different data sets and on different time scales? Thank you.

[yierrr]

Thanks for the intriguing research! I'm also curious about the context specificity of the research given the characteristics of Denmark.

[Dxu1]

Thank you Prof Akcigit for sharing this interesting paper. In this paper innovation outcome is mostly described by patent. However, it seems that many PhDs, particularly those within social science spectrum, do not directly create patents, but yet still contribute to productivity rises of an economy via other means. They seem to be out of your sample. I am curious about your perspective if addition of these samples would have any significant effect on your story.

[j2401]

Hello Professor Akcigit, I'm looking forward to hearing more regarding the considerations in the calibration stage, especially with the talent distribution and the parameter theta. I guess this also related closely to the IQ-Talent relationships questions asked by many of my colleagues.

[Qlei23]

Thank you for coming to our workshop and presenting this wonderful research. Embedding education policy into growth model is innovative. Looking forward to your presentation.

[zixu12]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you so much for coming to our workshop! I found your work on innovation and economic growth really intriguing. As your data source is from Denmark, a highly developed country. I am wondering how you expect your results to apply to the less developed world, or does your result relate to culture?

[kthomas14]

Thank you for sharing your paper with us Professor Akcigit! I would like to ask whether there are any considerations of incorporating other cognitive testing besides IQ to measure relationships with PhD intake.

[fiofiofiona]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you for sharing and presenting your work to the workshop! It is interesting to see how to evaluate innovation and key influencing factors in Denmark society, as well as their optimal effects on different conditions. Similar with many of my cohorts, I am also interested in knowing if there is a better way to define and measure talent. Intelligence consists of several different fields of cognitive capabilities, while talent in innovation may be part but not all of it.

[cgyhumble0612]

thank you so much for sharing with us your ideas and master work. I can't wait to attend this workshop for studying, communicating and improving myself~

[YileC928]

Hi professor Akcigit, thanks for sharing your paper with us! I am interested in learning more about the practical implications of your work, as it indeed is really close to our life:) Looking forwards to the sharing!

[97seshu]

Thank you for presenting at our workshop, Professor Akcigit. As my other classmates mentioned above, it will certainly be interesting to look at whether the observations vary across countries. I am curious about if western countries and eastern countries would value the qualities differently.

[YijingZhang-98]

Hi Prof. Akcigit, I was thinking about the innovation made by engineers without a Ph.D. degree? Would it be more precise if it could be taken into account?

[boyafu]

Thank you for sharing this fascinating research! I look forward to the presentation.

[chentian418]

Hi professor Akcigit, this is a really interesting and practical topic! I also came up with these questions several time, i.e., how do external forces in the society like educational policy link to talented individuals and how does the policy makers help relocate resources for these talents to maximize productivity. My question is that, given the ten facts supported by the micro-level data from Denmark, do you believe advanced education like PhD serves as an indication for their talent or a way to enhance their innovative ideas and productivity? Look forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[DehongUChi]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you very much for sharing your work with us! I am also wondering to what degree can the findings or methods in this research be generalized or used to research done in other countries where income level, income inequality ratio, preferences, and financial frictions level are different.

[yutaili]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you for sharing your work and I'm excited to attend the workshop tomorrow. My question is that your paper talks about the theoretical framework, and what practical inferences or suggestions you would make to the policy makers?

[Tanzi11]

Thank you professor Akcigit for sharing your work with us, and I look forward to your presentation!

[Hongkai040]

Thank you professor Akcigit for sharing your work with us. It's really interesting to put the study of education and innovation polices in a market with frictions frame. Looking forward to your talk tomorrow!

[NaiyuJ]

Hello Professor Akcigit, thank you very much for presenting your research to us. I am looking forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[YaoYao121]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you very much for sharing your work with us! I have a question about the external generality about the research design. Thanks!

[Coco-Jiachen-Yu]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thanks for sharing with us such an amazing work! I wonder if you'd anticipate a major cohort change to your study results, for instance, as a result of improved or decreased social inequality within the same country over years?

[YLHan97]

Hi Professor Akcigit, Thank you so much for sharing such interesting topic. Recently, R&D subsidies and higher education policy are knotty problems which every researchers is facing. I think it is quite a good time to talk about and deal with these issues.

[yiq029]

Hi Professor Akcigit, thank you very much for your presentation. I am looking forward to your presentation tomorrow!

[yjhuang99]

Hi Professor Akcigit, Thanks so much for coming to the workshop and sharing this paper with us! The policy implications from your research are very interesting, especially Table 3 that describes the heterogeneous effects of alternative policy interventions! It seems that compared with increasing R&D and providing more university slots, the better way to boost innovation capacity for a highly unequal society is to subsidize education. This result echoed with my personal experience that potential PhDs facing financial constraints would be even more hard-working and determined compared with normal PhDs if given appropriate fundings, for they tend to have fewer other alternatives and cherish the opportunity to stay in academia.

You mentioned that high-talent individuals may not enter a Ph.D. due to financial frictions and preferences. While subsidy is one solution, regarding preferences, is it possible that a society with a long history of emphasizing the importance of education and degrees has more potential to be more innovative? If so, why does the industrial revolution (a boom of innovations) not happen in four ancient civilizations? Also, I am wondering whether the subsidy should go to specific subjects (i.e. STEM or interdisciplinary subjects) for a better policy result.

[qishenfu1]

Hi Prof. Akcigit, I am very interested in the topic of your paper. I look forward to your presentation!

[sushanz]

Hello Prof. Akcigit,

Thank you for your time and presentation. The topic of your paper is really interesting that makes me to think further myself after reading. I believe that is the power of a social scientist, to make people think and ignite more ideas after. I wonder if people like us want to reproduce this research with the method you provided in your paper, to see if we can receive similar outcomes, will that be possible for us to use the data online? It seems pretty hard to reproduce the research overall.

I look forward to reading more detail of how you created your research model and those calculations.

[ShiyangLai]

Dear Professor Akcigit, thank you for sharing your work with us!

[luckycindyyx]

Thank you very much for sharing such interesting and inspiring research with us. I am looking forward to your lecture tomorrow!