S1E25: Interview with Anna Aizer, Brown, Editor of Journal of Human Resources

This week I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University and editor-in-chief at the Journal of Human Resources. I am a long time admirer of Dr. Aizer’s work and have followed her career with curiosity for a long time. Some of her papers imprinted pretty strongly on me. I’ll just briefly mention one.

Her 2015 article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics with Joe Doyle on juvenile incarceration, for instance, has haunted me for many many years. It was the first or second paper I had seen at the time that had used the now popular “leniency design” to examine the causal effect of being incarcerated as a youth on high school completion and other outcomes as well as adult incarceration. Simply comparing those outcomes for those incarcerated and those not incarcerated as a kid will not reveal the causal effect of juvenile incarceration if juvenile incarceration suffers from selection bias on unobservable confounders. So Dr. Aizer with Joe Doyle used a clever approach to overcome that problem in which they found quasi-random variation, disconnected from the unobserved confounder, in juvenile incarceration caused by the random assignment of juvenile judges. As these judges varied in the propensity to sentence kids, they effectively utilized the judges’ own decisions as life changing lotteries which they then used to study the effect of juvenile incarceration on high school and adult incarceration. And the findings were bleak, depressing, enraging, upsetting, sad, all the emotions. They found that indeed being assigned to a more strict judge substantially raised one’s chances of being sentenced as a kid. Using linked administrative data connecting each of those kids to their Chicago Public School data as well as Cook County incarceration data, they then found that being incarcerated significantly increased the effect of committing a criminal offense as an adult, and it decreased the probability of finishing high school. The kids, best they could tell, mostly didn’t return after their juvenile incarceration, but if they did return, they were more likely to be given a emotional and behavioral disorder label in the data. My interpretation was always severe — incarceration had scarred the kids, traumatizing them, and they weren’t the same.

The paper would haunt me for various personal reasons as I saw a loved one arrested and spent time in jail on numerous occasions. I would see kids in my local community who had grown up with our kids arrested and think of Dr. Aizer' and Joe Doyle’s study, concluding the most important thing I could do was bail them out. The paper was one of many events in my own life that led me to transition my research to mental illness within corrections and self harm attempts by inmates even.

But there’s other personal reasons I wanted to interview Dr. Aizer. Dr. Aizer went to UCLA where she studied with Janet Currie, Adriana Lleras-Muney and Guido Imbens. Recall that when Imbens was denied tenure at Harvard, he went to UCLA. Currie, who had attended Princeton at the same time as Angrist, Imbens’ coauthor on many papers on instrumental variables in the 1990s, was an original economist focused on the family, but unlike Becker and others, brought with her that focused attention to finding variation in data that could plausibly recover causal effects. The story, in other words, of Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section and design based causal inference, going back to Orley Ashenfelter, was spreading through the profession through the placements of scholars at places like UCLA, which is where Dr. Aizer was a student. In this storyline in my head, Dr. Aizer was a type of first generation member of the credibility revolution, and I wanted to talk to her not only for her scholarly work’s influence on me, but also because I wanted to continue tracing Imbens and Angrist’s influence on the profession through UCLA.

The interview, though, was warm and interesting throughout. Dr. Aizer is a bright light in the profession working on important questions in the family, poverty and public policy. For anyone interested in the hardships of our communities and neighborhoods, I highly recommend to you her work.

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Transcript

Scott Cunningham:

In this week's episode of the Mix Tape podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Anna Aizer, professor of economics at Brown University in Rhode Island and editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources. I have had a keen interest in Anna Aizer and her career and her work for a couple of reasons. Actually a lot, but here's two. First, she did her PhD at UCLA when Janet Currie was there, as well as when Guido Imbens was there. Imbens taught there after he left Harvard, for those of you that remember that interview I did with him. Recall my overarching conviction that Princeton's industrial relations section, which was where Orley Ashelfeltner, David Card, Alan Kruger, Bob Lalonde, Josh Angrist originated from, as well as Janet Currie.

My conviction that this was the ground zero of design based causal inference. And that design based causal inference spread through economics, not really through econometrics, and econometrics textbooks, but really through applied people. She also worked with Adriana Lleras-Muney, who's also at UCLA now, who was a student of Rajeev Dehejia, who wrote a seminal work in economics using propensity score, who was also Josh Angrist’s student at MIT. So you can see, Anna fits my obsession with a sociological mapping out of the spread of causal inference through the applied community.

But putting aside Anna as being instrumentally interesting, I am directly interested in her and her work on domestic violence and youth incarceration among other things. I've followed it super closely, teach a lot of these papers all the time, think about them even more. In this episode, we basically walked through her early life in Manhattan to her time at Amherst College, to her first jobs working in nonprofits, in areas of reform and poverty, to graduate school. We talked about her thoughts about domestic violence and poverty and crime along the way, too. And it was just a real honor and a pleasure to get to talk to her. I hope you like it as much as me. My name is Scott Cunningham and this is Mix Tape podcast. Okay. It's really great to introduce my guest this week on the podcast, Anna Aizer. Anna, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Anna Aizer:

Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Scott Cunningham:

Before we get started, could you tell us obviously your name and your training and where you work?

Anna Aizer:

Sure. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University. I did my PhD at UCLA oh many years ago. Before that actually I got a masters in public health. Sorry. I have a strong public health interest and focus in a lot of my work. I'm also currently the co-director of the NBR program on children. That is a program at the NBR that is focused entirely on the economics of children and families. I'm the editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources.

Scott Cunningham:

Great. It's so nice to meet in person. I've been a long time reader of your papers because you write about these topics on violence against women. There's not a lot of people in economics that do. And the way that you approach it shares a lot of my own thoughts. I'm going to talk about it later, but it's really nice to meet in person.

Anna Aizer:

Sure. Nice to meet you, too.

Scott Cunningham:

Okay. I want to break up the conversation a little bit into your life. First part, just talk about your life growing up. And then the second part, I want to talk about research stuff. So where did you grow up?

Anna Aizer:

I grew up in New York City.

Scott Cunningham:

Oh, okay.

Anna Aizer:

Yeah, I did.

Scott Cunningham:

Which, borough was it?

Anna Aizer:

Manhattan.

Scott Cunningham:

Oh, okay.

Anna Aizer:

Yeah. Yeah. Upper side. But when I went off to college, I went to rural Massachusetts.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah.

Anna Aizer:

Yeah. I went to Amherst, which is a very small liberal arts college in the Berkshires. That was a very different experience for me. And believe it or not, I was not an econ major.

Scott Cunningham:

Oh, you weren't?

Anna Aizer:

In fact I was not. I only took one econ course my entire four years in college.

Scott Cunningham:

Oh, wow. Wait, so what'd you major in?

Anna Aizer:

I majored in American studies with a focus on colonial American history and literature.

Scott Cunningham:

Mm. On literature. Oh, that's what I majored in, too.

Anna Aizer:

Yeah.

Scott Cunningham:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. So early American history. So what, was this was the 1700s or even-

Anna Aizer:

Yeah. So I did a lot of 17, 1800s, a lot of the New Republic period. My undergraduate thesis was actually on girls schooling in the Early Republic.

Scott Cunningham: