“Best Second Year Paper” prize awarded to two graduate students in Economics
Two graduate students in Economics have just been awarded the 2016-2017 Best Second Year Paper prize. Both students will be awarded a one-semester service-free fellowship during the upcoming academic year.
Chelsea Carter was recognized for her paper titled “The Road to Urban Interstates: A Case Study from Detroit.” The paper studies the placement of urban interstate highways in the 1950s, using Detroit as a case study. Chelsea finds that interstates were routed through neighborhoods with low median housing values, and that this was an intentional decision by policymakers. Also, neighborhoods bisected by an interstate highway had lower housing values in 1990. The committee recognized the enormous new data collection effort and the creativeness of her analysis.
Huiren Tan was recognized for his paper titled “Turning Back Time on the Cross: Re-evaluating the Relative Efficiency of Slave Labor.” The paper reanalyzes the classic work of Fogel and Engerman, who argued that there were economies of scale associated with the use of slave labor in Southern agriculture before the Civil War, but these were triggered only when the number of slaves exceeded the threshold of 15 slaves. Huiren successfully replicates the original findings of Fogel and Engerman, but shows, using modern regression discontinuity techniques, that the result of a discontinuous jump in productivity at the 15 slave threshold is not robust, and is sensitive to the inclusion of large plantations. The committee recognized that this is a very strong paper, which is likely to shift some strongly held priors in one of the oldest and most contentious issues in US economic history.
Congratulations, Huiren and Chelsea!