­Stacey H. Chen

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Address

Horton Hall

Royal Holloway University of London

Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX

United Kingdom

Telephone: +44 2032 864238

E-mail: chens@nber.org


 

Education

Ph.D. Economics, University of Rochester 2002.

M.S. Engineering Economics Systems and Operations Research (Management Science and Engineering), Stanford University 1997.

M.S. Economics, National Taiwan University 1992.

B.A. Economics, National Taiwan University 1990.

 

Employment:

Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor), Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, August 2008-present.

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 2008 autumn.

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, SUNY Albany, 2002 spring – 2008 summer.

Visiting Scholar, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, 2004 spring -2004 winter.

Visiting Scholar, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2006 spring.

Lecturer, Department of Economics, SUNY Albany, 2001 autumn.

 

Internal Positions of Responsibility Held

Dissertation Coordinator, 2010 in Term 2

 

External Positions of Responsibility Held

Research Associate, Institute of Fiscal Studies, University College London, 2009 spring-present

Research Associate, Centre for the Economics of Education, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009 spring-present

 

Important Academic Initiatives

·         Develop new estimation methods to evaluate the importance of changes in educational composition on rising wage inequality

·         Estimate the effect of having a brother relative to a sister on women’s health and educational outcomes, to enhance our understanding about within-family allocation of resources

·         Estimate the relationship between cohabitation and children’s health and education in United Kingdom

 

Teaching Achievements

I teach Intermediate Microeconomics (EC2201) for the second year, Econometrics (EC3333) for the third year, and lecture (EC1103) on Wage Inequality to the first-year students in 2009 and on Introduction to Econometrics in 2010. I am a Dissertation Coordinator in 2010 Term 2, where I liaise on the allocation of supervisors for the students taking EC3400. This year I write nearly one hundred reference letters for 12 undergraduate students who apply for graduate schools. I also recommend one student for his job search in private sectors. Some of them have received conditional offers from UCL, Warwick, and Royal Holloway. Currently I’m supervising a PhD candidate on a research project. For details see the teaching profile at attached.

Internal Examining

2009      EC2201 Intermediate Microeconomics

2010      EC3333 Econometrics; EC3400 Dissertation 

 

Research Interest

Within-group wage inequality can be driven by unobserved heterogeneity or by unforeseeable economic shocks, which give distinct interpretations for rising inequality in the eyes of policymakers. If the inequality is driven primarily by unobserved heterogeneity, such as unmeasured earning ability, rising wage inequality would have been caused mostly by rising skill price and it should be embraced and celebrated by social planners. But if the inequality is driven primarily by randomness in the markets, policymakers should seek effective actions to reduce the degree of uncertainty and make the markets transparent. In my paper published in Review of Economics and Statistics, I took a parametric approach to disentangle these two components, while tackling selection issues in measuring wage inequality by education levels. A follow-up paper with Professor Shakeeb Khan (Duke University, USA) relaxed the parametric assumptions and generalized the methods to allow outliers in wage distributions.  In a most recent working paper, I further relax the required conditions in latent index models. I will apply these methods to a newly available data link from 1990 to 2000 US census. I will explore several plausible sources of exogenous variation in education to evaluate the causal impact of education on within-group wage inequality. 

Another recent interest of mine is female inequality in developing countries. Using birth registry and health insurance data from the entire Taiwan, where preference for boys is extremely prevalent even to date, several Taiwanese researchers (Dr. Yenchien Chen, Chi-Nan University; Professor Jin-Tan Liu, National Taiwan University) and I are investigating the causal impact of having a brother on girls’ health and education outcomes. We exploit the randomness of twin sex composition as a plausible source of variation in sibling sex. We find the impact is either nearly zero or statistically insignificant, suggesting that the rivalry of male siblings might have been offset by the spillover effects.  Furthermore, because girls tend to have more siblings due to pro male bias, we turn our attention to the population of singletons and further distinguish the direct effect of having a brother (relative to a sister), from the indirect effect via decreasing family size. But family size is another outcome given a sibling sex shock, so observed family size cannot serve as a controlled variable, though the results in previous work were built upon the presumption that family size is exogenous. To address this in our recent article, we clarify the concept of the indirect effect using the change in potential family size. We show that even if family size is exogenous, we still need to instrument for family size, as long as it depends on the treatment (sibling sex composition in this case).  We find that if there is any effect of having a brother (relative to a sister) on girls, it is mostly by indirect effects via changes in family size, not the direct effect per se.

 

Research Awards

·        2009-2010 British Academy (£7500), Small Research Grant “Estimate the Causal Effects of Education on Wage Inequality, Using Non-public Use Data.”

·        2006-2010 NSF Grant (US$511,741) “New Instrumental-Variables Estimates of the Effects of Schooling and Military Service: Empirical Strategies Using Non-Public-Use Data,” with Joshua Angrist and Justin McCrary.

·        2007 Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Program (Paid Leave), State University of New York at Albany

·        2001 Research Grant (US$300), Friends of Library, University of Rochester

 

Academic Awards and Prizes

·        1997—1999 University of Rochester Scholarship

·        1995—1996 University of Rochester Scholarship

·        1994 Nomination for the Best Master Thesis Award, Taiwan Economics Association

·        1989—1990 National Taiwan University Scholarship, (equivalent of) highest honors

 

Invited Talks and Conference Papers Since Appointment

International Conferences or Talks to Non-UK Audience:

European University Institute, Economics Department, Florence Italy (2010 March)

Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economics, University College London (2010 June)

National Bureau of Economic Research, Spring Meetings, Health Economics and Children's Programs, Boston USA (2009 May)

American Economic Association Meeting, San Francisco, USA (2009 January)

The Conference on Globalization, Chinese University of Hong Kong (2008 December)

The Asian conference on Applied Microeconomics and Econometrics, National Taiwan University, Taipei Taiwan (2008 December)

National Chengchi University, Department of Economics, Taipei Taiwan (2008 December)

National Taiwan University, Department of Economics, Taipei Taiwan (2008 October)

Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei Taiwan (2008 April, December)

Chi-Nan University, Department of Ethnology, Historical and Population Workshop, Pulee Taiwan (2009 October)

To UK Audience:

Centre for the Economics of Education, London School Economics and Political Sciences, (2010 May)

Centre for Economic Performance,  Labor Market Workshop, London School of Economics and Political Sciences (2009 February)

 

Membership of Professional Bodies

Royal Economic Society, American Economic Association, Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists

 

Referee Services

Journal Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, Canadian Economic Review, European Economic Review, Journal of Human Capital, Pacific Economic Review, Taiwan Economic Review, Center for Economic Studies U.S. Census Bureau, Labour Economics

Staff Development Activities

Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Teaching and Learning (CAPITAL) 2009-2011, Year One, 2009 Autumn – 2001 Spring

 

Date the curriculum vitae was prepared: March 9, 2010

APPENDIX A – TEACHING PROFILE

APPENDIX B – A LIST OF POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS SUPERVISED

APPENDIX C – PUBLICATIONS

APPENDIX D- WORK IN PREPARATION