Tuesdays • Live Stream
PIER Public Seminar Series
February 1: Barbara Biasi
The Education-Innovation Gap
NEW TIME (This seminar only): 12:00 PM EST
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About the Speaker
Barbara Biasi
Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale University
Visiting Assistant Professor, Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance
Faculty Profile | @barbarabiasi
About the Presentation
Report Abstract
This paper examines whether college and university courses teach frontier knowledge. Comparing the text of 1.7 million course syllabi with the abstract of 20 million articles in top scientific journals at various points in time, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” aimed at capturing the distance between each course and frontier knowledge and defined as the average similarity with older articles divided by the average similarity with newer articles. We then document how the gap varies across and within schools. We find that the gap is lower in schools that spend more, are more selective, and serve fewer disadvantaged and minority students. The gap is also strongly associated to instructors: it decreases after the instructor of a course changes and it is lower for courses taught by research-active faculty. Lastly, the gap is correlated with students’ graduation rates and incomes after graduation. These findings are robust to the use of alternative measures of course novelty.
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About PIER
The PIER Public Seminar Series is designed to explore important questions and insights in education research and policy.
This event will livestreamed via the HGSE YouTube Live account and embedded on this webpage.
If you are a part of the Harvard Community and would like to participate in the event via Zoom, you may request access by emailing pier_fellowship@gse.harvard.edu.
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