Jobs and spouses in Denmark

 Matching is both consequential and difficult: it is how we sort into jobs and careers, and marriages and families.  Here's a paper that looks at the relationship between those two matching markets, taking advantage of the fact that Danish medical grads get random priorities, which determine their early-career job matches.

Causal Effects of Early Career Sorting on Labor and Marriage Market Choices: A Foundation for Gender Disparities and Norms  by Itzik Fadlon, Frederik Plesner Lyngse & Torben Heien Nielsen, NBER WORKING PAPER 28245, DOI 10.3386/w28245 ISSUE DATE December 2020, REVISION DATE July 2022

Abstract: "We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships across local labor markets. Using administrative data spanning ten years after physicians’ graduations, we find causal effects of early-career sorting on a range of life cycle outcomes that cascade from labor market choices, including human capital accumulation and occupational choice, to marriage market choices, including matching and fertility. The persistent effects are entirely concentrated among women, whereas men experience only temporary career disruptions. The evidence points to differential family-career tradeoffs and the mentorship employers provide as channels underlying this gender divergence. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at gender equality in outcomes, as they reveal how persistent gaps can arise even in institutionally gender-neutral settings with early-stage equality of opportunity."

"placement into medical internships—i.e., physicians’ first jobs—is governed in Denmark by a purely randomized lottery ... As we verify, students with the best lottery ranks,who are the ones that choose  first,are  effectively  unrestricted in their  choices  and  are assigned  their  highest priorities,whereas students with the worst lottery ranks,who are the ones that choose last and well after their choice sets have narrowed, are assigned their lowest priorities.

...

"we exploit a novel dataset that combines the formal lottery data we have digitized with a range of administrative datasets on all medical doctors in Denmark. ... we can link households using spousal and parent-child linkages to investigate family formation and fertility. Together, the data allow us to study a wide range of lifecycle choices, in both the labor market and the marriage market, which provides us with the unique advantage of conducting a comprehensive analysis on the broad potential causal effects of early careerson work versus family tradeoffs. The data allow us to track our sample over a long period of up to ten years after the treatment.

...

"We show that the women who have more children due to the treatment also invest less in human capital, and that their location decisions reflect family considerations as they show increased propensity to live near grandparents. This is consistent with women crowding out long-run career goals for more family-oriented choices as  a  result  of  unfavorable early-career placements.  In  comparison,  men engage in career-oriented actions in response to unfavorable placements,which help them fend off potential adverse effects. .... the data are strongly inconsistent with differential preferences  over  entry-level  positions as  a  channel. Males  and  females  reveal  very  similar  aggregate preferences in their choices over entry-level markets and positions.

San Francisco's Lowell High School admissions will return to merit-based system

 The SF Chronicle has the latest twist in this involved story over San Francisco's elite Lowell High School.

Lowell High School admissions will return to merit-based system after S.F. school board vote  by Jill Tucker

"After nearly two years of intense and bitter debate, test scores and grades will once again determine which San Francisco students are admitted to Lowell High School after the city’s school board decided to return to the merit-based admission system Wednesday.

"In a 4-3 vote, the school board decided to restore the previous merit process after two years of using a lottery-based system. The vote will now apply to freshman entering in the fall of 2023 as well as future classes, unless the board takes further action in the future to change the admission process.

...

"The board’s decision was the latest inflection point in the nearly two-year saga featuring feuding public officials, a lawsuit and accusations of racism over which students are eligible to attend Lowell, long considered one of the highest-performing public high schools in the country.

"The board first approved a switch to a lottery system in October 2020, citing a lack of academic data given the switch to distance learning earlier that year.

"A board majority then made that decision permanent four months later, citing a lack of diversity and racism at the elite academic schools. But the hurried vote sparked a lawsuit and then a judge’s ruling that the district violated laws related to the Brown Act, which regulate public meetings.

"The board then had to backpedal, reversing the decision before extending the lottery process for another year."

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Earlier:

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Lowell High School principal resigns in San Francisco, in latest setback for elite high school

New York City school choice: increased use of lotteries in the news

The recent emphasis on lotteries in NYC school choice is discussed in the NY Times:

N.Y.C. Tried to Fix High School Admissions. Some Parents Are Furious. In an attempt to democratize schools, the city is focusing less on grades, attendance and test scores. Instead, it relies heavily on a lottery.  By Ginia Bellafante

"Some back story: Apart from what are known as the specialized high schools — hypercompetitive institutions like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that, controversially, admit students on the basis of a single standardized test — the city gives eighth graders the option of applying to 160 screened high schools and programs that have their own criteria.

"Whether a student qualifies for one of these selective schools has typically depended on an opaque combination of grades, test scores (different from the ones used for the specialized high schools), essays, art portfolios and other work. The next step has students rank their preferences in descending order on a scale of one to 12, after which they are thrown into a lottery. A prizewinning algorithm developed to match medical students to residency programs then determines where a student is placed.

"Among high-achieving families in Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn and many parts of Queens, the goal is not a spot in just any of the 160 schools but admission to eight or nine that are especially competitive, prestigious and largely dominated by white and Asian families. What has caused such ire in the current admissions cycle is that many parents discovered that their children — students with grade-point averages in the high 90s, for instance — were admitted to none of their ranked choices. Instead they would be funneled to schools they knew little about.

...

"The state exams, usually a determining factor in high school placements, had been abandoned during the pandemic. So, too, were attendance records. Students with grades in the mid-80s were now bundled with those who had much higher averages, meaning that an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely very good student with a great lottery assignation."

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Previous related posts:

Monday, April 18, 2022

NYC plugs a school choice leak (of random numbers)

Friday, April 29, 2022

More on NYC school choice lotteries

More on NYC school choice lotteries

 Following my recent post on random numbers in the NYC school choice system(s) for high school and middle school, Amélie Marian writes to me from Rutgers, where she is a professor of computer science and a close observer of school choice.

She writes:

"I just read your blog post about the NYC school lottery system glitch and I found the comparison to plumbing extremely adequate to describe what has been happening with the NYC school admission system these past few years. 

...

"One of the most major recent change is that most admissions are now decided solely by lottery numbers; most schools don't rank students anymore***. The random number, originally designed as a tie-breaker, is now the main deciding factor. With this in mind, I, along with parent advocacy groups, pushed the DOE to provide students with their lottery numbers so that families could adjust their expectations and strategize their lists to avoid being unmatched; in one Manhattan district last year, 18% of students did not receive an offer to a school on their list. I have been working on explaining the system to parents, and on crowdsourcing data to help parents estimate their student's odds of admissions at various schools:

 * Part 1 on the random numbers: https://medium.com/p/bae7148e337d  

* Part 2 on their impacts on strategy: https://medium.com/p/42dd9a98b115

"*** MS admissions is purely lottery-based but geographically limited by district. HS admissions is city-wide. Some HS are allowed to screen students, but the screening is very coarse; this year 63% of students qualify in the top screening group, within the group admissions are decided by lottery numbers.

 "Of course, every modification in the system has had unintended consequences. The "glitch" reported by the NYPost was likely due to the DOE system assigning random numbers to applications and not to students, which was a reasonable approach as long as the numbers were not shared with families. And, as you pointed out in previous blog posts, the addition of waitlists has had repercussions as well. In fact, the DOE has changed the way it processes waitlists yearly since their inception, most likely to fix the problems that the previous iteration created. The latest version unfortunately introduces an incentive to strategize for waitlists in the original choice ranked list. "

NYC plugs a school choice leak (of random numbers)

 Some time ago, Esther Duflo likened market design to plumbing. I think she had in mind construction plumbing, making sure the pipes are all tight. But there's also maintenance (and home repair) plumbing, which involves plugging new leaks.  Parag Pathak alerts me to such an issue in New York City's school choice system.

The NY Post has the story:

Parents uncover major glitch in NYC school lottery system  By Susan Edelman 

"A Manhattan mom discovered an embarrassing glitch in the city Department of Education lottery system used to match students with middle and high schools.

"When NYC students filled out their online applications for 2022-23, each kid automatically received a long string of random numbers from 0 to 9 mixed with lower-case letters from a to f. 

"The random numbers are used to determine the order in which students are matched to programs.

"Lottery numbers starting with 0 are most likely to land students in a school at the top of their list – 8th graders can rank up to 12 preferred high schools. 

...

"But as one 8th-grader’s mom figured out, if students canceled and re-started their applications – as the DOE permitted – they received a different lottery number each time. The loophole allowed users to potentially game the system by simply re-applying until a favorable lottery number popped up.

"Parent leaders alerted the DOE’s Chief Enrollment Officer, Sarah Kleinhandler, who was unaware of the snafu and promised to look into it. She did.

...

"The DOE said it was able to identify 163 students who received new lottery numbers – less than 1 percent of applicants. They included 121 students out of 71,000 high-school applicants, and 42 students out of 58,000 middle school applicants, a spokesman said.

"Students who received new lottery numbers after restarting their applications will get their first lottery numbers back, a spokeswoman told The Post."

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Speaking of home repairs, here's an earlier post about some self inflicted problems:

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Confusion in NYC high school wait lists