Author
Ella Tracy
Intern, Institute
Sometimes, the best way to understand an idea is to meet the people who devote their time and energy to studying it. This series of short Q&As spotlights individuals whose research seeks to understand how economic opportunity and inclusive growth work in America today.
For this installment, we sat down with Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute visiting scholar Barbara Biasi, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, to discuss education, economic mobility, and the creative process of research.
What made you decide to study economics? Have you always wanted to be an economist, and if not, what got you into economics?
I ended up becoming an economist a little bit by chance. Before entering college, I did not know what economics was and I had never met an economist. I didn’t have a lot of guidance in terms of choosing a major because I am the first person to go to college in my immediate family. I was a good student and I was interested in a lot of things, but I couldn’t really see myself going for one major versus another.
I ended up enrolling in a business program because I found social science to be interesting. I’m originally from Italy, and in Italian, economics and business have the same word for their major. You also have to pick a major when you enroll in college in Italy. So you can’t enroll with an open mind and then try a bunch of different things and decide afterwards. So that made things a little bit trickier. I thought business would be a type of degree that would open a lot of different possibilities.
As I was studying business, I realized that all the classes I found most interesting were the ones that applied math and statistics to social science problems. Once I was exposed to some of the questions that economists think about, the topic of intergenerational mobility became immediately interesting to me. My parents didn’t go to college, and my mom didn’t graduate high school, yet I was able to have a completely different trajectory. I became really interested in trying to understand what the determinants or the turning points in people’s trajectories are that can allow for these types of paths to occur.
What is, in your opinion, the most useful idea in economics?
I’m going to be boring here and say that I think that, in general, the most useful idea is opportunity costs, which really boils down to the idea that everything, but especially time and energy, is limited, and their value depends on the next best thing that you could be doing with those resources. Forgetting about opportunity costs can lead to poor decision-making.
Another concept that I tend to forget about in my day-to-day life is the concept of sunk costs. This means that you can’t change something that’s already happened and it makes no sense to try to think about what the decisions could have been.
What are you studying now?
I’m studying two things related to education. The first thing is what students study in college and how it affects them. I look at different dimensions like the types of problems students get exposed to and the relevance of these concepts given the state of the real world. I also study how exposure to these different dimensions impacts students who come into college with different levels of preparation or family backgrounds, in addition to how it affects their higher education and career trajectories.
The second topic is K through 12 education in the U.S., particularly the governance of public schools and why governance matters. For example, what are the powers that people in positions of leadership have? How do they use them? Why are certain decisions made given the leadership’s incentives and the preferences of the taxpayers?
What would you like to study next?
I’ve always been passionate about topics that have to do with teachers’ labor markets. Teachers are incredibly important, but we’re doing a relatively poor job selecting and retaining talented teachers in public schools. I would be interested in revisiting some questions that I’ve studied in the past, like trying to understand why teaching seems to be considered a “low prestige” occupation. This is important because it determines the decisions that talented people make about joining the profession and the way that pay is structured.
How does your research relate to economic opportunity and inclusive growth?
These things motivate pretty much everything I do. The ultimate goal of my work is to understand how institutions, particularly within education and the labor market, affect the trajectories of people who come from different backgrounds. The overarching theme of all my papers is to understand how economic opportunity is generated, what policies are implemented to sustain opportunity, and what the ramifications of those policies are.
What is an important economic statistic that you think people should know?
The dramatic decline in extreme poverty rates that the world has experienced in the last 30 years. The share of people in the world living below the extreme poverty line was close to 40 percent in 1990; now it’s less than 10 percent. There’s a lot of nuances behind those simple numbers, but I think that’s a hopeful message that more people should keep in mind.
What is a helpful piece of advice that you have received, or advice you would give your younger self?
The best piece of advice that I have received as a researcher is to not study what is cool or what is in fashion. Study what you’re passionate about. Very good ideas come from genuine interest and passion in certain topics or topics that are close to your experience. This was the case with me with intergenerational mobility, opportunity, and education. That applies to research in all fields since research really is an inherently creative process.
The advice that I would give to my younger self is to trust the process, work hard every day, and not overstress over a bad day. There’s a lot of days where you go home and you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything. It took me a while to realize that those days are part of the process. You need those days to then one day get a breakthrough that’s going to make a paper.
If you could talk to anyone in the world for an hour, who would it be and what would you talk about?
Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. public schools [from 2007 to 2010] and the leader of a massive reform program for public school teachers. A lot of people didn’t like what she was doing, and I don’t necessarily agree with her on all fronts, but I think she’s an example of a leader who firmly believed in something and used all her political capital to accomplish it, which is not something that we see very often.
What is a new skill or ability you wish you had?
The ability to type super fast as I’m thinking things! I make a lot of typing mistakes. New AI dictation apps are able to understand my English with a strong Italian accent, so I don’t have to type as much as before.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
