Browsing by Author "He, YingHua"
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Item Essays on Admissions to Higher Education and Juvenile Criminal Justice(2024-04-15) Chen, Yu-Kuan; He, YingHuaThis dissertation consists of two chapters studying problems faced by youths in two contexts that could be pivotal to their future: admissions to higher education and the juvenile criminal justice system. The underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields has been studied extensively, and there have been calls for improving the gender balance in STEM fields through admission policies in higher education. In the first chapter, I estimate preferences for both applicants and programs using data from the centralized post-secondary admission system in Taiwan and explore how the preferences relate to the gender gap in STEM fields. To account for applicants’ and programs’ decision timing, I introduce a modified version of the truth-telling assumption for estimating preferences under a deferred-acceptance mechanism. On the program side, I find substantial heterogeneity across programs in gender preferences, reflected in their ranking of applicants. On the applicants’ side, the largest difference between gender lies in male applicants’ preference for programs where students are strong in math, and the preference is higher for those with lower math scores. Female applicants’ emphasis on math is weaker and show less heterogeneity. To examine the potential impact of implementing minority reserves within STEM programs on gender balance, I conduct simulations of a counterfactual policy reserving seats for women in admissions to STEM programs. I find that while minority reserves could yield improvements in female representation within STEM programs, the magnitude of these changes are modest. The results also suggest that the limited efficacy of such policies may stem from the concentration of female applicants’ preferences towards similar programs. In the second chapter (co-authored with Diego Amador), I study the effects of short-term detention on youths when they are arrested for the first time. Many youths accused of delinquent conduct are detained as their cases get processed by juvenile courts. Using a decade of detailed administrative data for all initial detention decisions made in Harris County, we find that these short-term detentions of low-risk youths lead to a sizeable increase in the likelihood of rearrest. We also find that these effects are concentrated on youths arrested for non-violent, less serious offenses and are unrelated to the actual amount of time spent in detention. To obtain our estimates, we implement the double/debiased machine learning estimator for matching, which relies on selection on observables as the key assumption. We go beyond traditional robustness checks by directly gauging the vulnerability of our results to violations of selection on observables, and sensitivity tests show that our estimates are robust to plausible levels of violations of this assumption.Item Essays on Matching Markets(2023-04-13) Kutasi, Kristof; Tang, Xun; He, YingHuaThis dissertation consists of three chapters addressing several matching market questions applied to school choice, vaccine allocation and job search problems. In the first chapter, I study the role of information uncertainty in a many-to-one matching problem in a centralized college admissions system. I find that the mistakes of excluding almost surely out-of-reach programs from the rank-order list (ROL) do not change the allocation outcome significantly but using the observed ROLs as the true preferences would lead to biased estimates of student preference and misleading counterfactual results. I build a model where students are allowed to make certain mistakes in their ROLs when they face uncertainties in their priority scores. I argue that stability of the admission outcome is satisfied asymptotically. I estimate student preferences based on stability using a Gibbs sampler. I analyze two counterfactual policies in which students from rural high schools receive benefits in a form of additional priorities and seats. The policies would not hurt the welfare of the urban students significantly more than they would benefit the welfare of rural students. The second chapter (co-authored with Júlia Koltai, Ágnes Szabó-Morvai, Gergely Röst, M\'arton Karsai, Péter Biró, Balázs Lengyel) studies the vaccine acceptance and the assessment of five vaccines during the end of the third wave Covid-19 pandemic in Hungary based on a nationally representative survey. Individuals could reject the assigned vaccine to wait for a more preferred alternative that enables us to quantify revealed preferences across vaccine types. We find that hesitancy is heterogenous across vaccine types and is mostly driven by individuals’ trusted source of information. We argue that the greater selection of available vaccines and individuals’ free choice of vaccines create desirable conditions to increase the vaccination rate in societies. In the third chapter I study one-to-one matching markets in a labor setting, where applicants and firms’ pay wasteful costs to search and screen, respectively. Unlike in Arnosti et al. (2021) firms might receive a biased signal about the applicant’s compatibility. I ask the research question: How much additional cost would the applicants be willing to pay to eliminate firms’ biased screening?Item Impact of air pollution on human activities: Evidence from nine million mobile phone users(Public Library of Science, 2021) Chen, Wei; He, YingHua; Pan, ShiyuanTo measure the effects of air pollution on human activities, this study applies statistical/econometric modeling to hourly data of 9 million mobile phone users from six cities in China’s Zhejiang Province from December 18 to 21, 2013. Under a change in air quality from “Good” (Air Quality Index, or AQI, between 51 and 100) to “Heavily Polluted” (AQI between 201 to 300), the following effects are demonstrated. (i) Consistent with the literature, for every one million people, 1, 482 fewer individuals are observed at parks, 95% confidence interval or CI (−2, 229, −735), which represents a 15% decrease. (ii) The number of individuals at shopping malls has no statistically significant change. (iii) Home is the most important location under worsening air quality, and for every one million people, 63, 088 more individuals are observed at home, 95% CI (47, 815, 78, 361), which represents a 19% increase. (iv) Individuals are on average 633 meters closer to their home, 95% CI (529, 737); as a benchmark, the median distance from home ranges from 300 to 1900 meters across the cities in our sample. These effects are not due to weather or government regulations. We also provided provisional evidence that individuals engage in inter-temporal activity substitutions within a day, which leads to mitigated (but not nullified) effects of air pollution on daily activities.Item Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation(Springer Nature, 2022) Chen, Yan; He, YingHuaWhen participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance mechanism incentivizes students to learn their own cardinal and others’ preferences. We demonstrate that information acquisition costs affect the efficiency of each mechanism and the welfare ranking between the two. In the case where everyone has the same ordinal preferences, we evaluate the welfare effects of various information provision policies by education authorities.Item Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation(Springer Nature, 2022) Chen, Yan; He, YingHuaWhen participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance mechanism incentivizes students to learn their own cardinal and others’ preferences. We demonstrate that information acquisition costs affect the efficiency of each mechanism and the welfare ranking between the two. In the case where everyone has the same ordinal preferences, we evaluate the welfare effects of various information provision policies by education authorities.Item Information acquisition and provision in school choice: An experimental study(Elsevier, 2021) Chen, Yan; He, YingHuaWhen participating in school choice, students often spend substantial effort acquiring information about schools. We investigate how two popular mechanisms incentivize students' information acquisition in the laboratory. While students' willingness to pay for information is significantly greater under the Immediate than the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, most students over-invest in information acquisition, especially when they are more curious or believe that others invest more. Additionally, some students never invest in information acquisition but benefit equally from information provision. Both free provision and costly acquisition of information on students' own preferences increase their payoffs and allocative efficiency, whereas provision of information that helps students better assessing admission chances reduces wasteful investments. Our results also suggest that agents' information preferences, such as curiosity, can play an important role in market design theory and policy.Item Preference Discovery in University Admissions: The Case for Dynamic Multioffer Mechanisms(The University of Chicago Press, 2022) Grenet, Julien; He, YingHua; Kübler, DorotheaWe document quasi-experimental evidence against the common assumption in the matching literature that agents have full information on their own preferences. In Germany’s university admissions, the first stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm are implemented in real time, allowing for multiple offers per student. We demonstrate that nonexploding early offers are accepted more often than later offers, despite not being more desirable. These results, together with survey evidence and a theoretical model, are consistent with students’ costly discovery of preferences. A novel dynamic multioffer mechanism that batches early offers improves matching efficiency by informing students of offer availability before preference discovery.