Colloquium Lays Out Importance of Economic Research in Policy Development

An overflow crowd interacted with three top KU economists on April 7 during a special colloquium hosted by Dr. Dietrich Earnhart, the Economics Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies.  The colloquium format provides an important on-ramp to excite students about continuing to develop good quantitative skills and an economic policy tool kit.

Distinguished Professor Dr. Donna Ginther kicked things off by explaining the extent to which a great deal of research is policy-relevant.  Dr Ginther, who also serves as Director of KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research, has published landmark research studying gender, race and ethnicity differences in academia and the sciences.  The “Ginther Gap” – demonstrated by her research showing racial disparities in NIH funding – ultimately led to creation of a special task force at the agency to address the problem.

A renowned labor economist, Dr. Ginther discussed some of her latest research (“Impact of AI on the US Labor Market – The Brave New World”) on the dramatic changes artificial intelligence is already bringing to labor markets – as well as its future employment implications for today’s college students.

“Advancing technology has always been destructive for segments of labor markets,” she said.  “But AI has accelerated this trend in many ways.  Jobs like driving – where in 2003 everyone thought humans would never be able to be replaced – are now front and center.  Driverless trucks are already up and running in Texas and are likely to be everywhere in the coming years.”

She added that AI is “now starting to come for certain jobs that require college degrees,” noting that entry level software development jobs have been declining significantly since 2022 (but that health care related jobs appear to have been picking up the slack). 

“So labor markets are changing in real time.  As a student, you need to be able to not only use AI to be more productive while you are here; but also to be able to think about all of these dramatic changes during the time you are pursuing your degrees here at KU,” she said.

Dr. Will Duncan, assistant research professor of data science, further emphasized the extent to economic principles taught at KU are highly applicable to policy evaluation and ultimately to policy making.  He explained that much of his previous and ongoing research involving data bases provided by the Kansas Board of Regents that helped answer important questions on the extent to which Higher Education is meeting its societal missions.

“The hope is that policy makers can subsequently make any adjustments necessary to make Higher Education more successful,” he added.

Dr. Duncan, who serves as co-director of the Kansas Data Science Consortium, then briefly presented some of his research on the extent to which students who spend their first two years studying at community colleges before transferring to Regents’ institutions to earn their bachelors’ degrees ultimately face any kind of labor market wage penalty compared to students who spend the entirety of their undergraduate college careers at Regents’ institutions.

Dr. Earnhart, Director of KU’s prestigious Center for Environmental Policy, underlined everything said by presenting some of his fascinating research (“Environmental Injustice:  The Privilege of Clean Water”) on the extent to which race, ethnicity and income may play a role in the extent to which levels of wastewater pollution end up being maintained at below the levels permitted by regulators under the Clean Water Act (overcompliance). 

“Community pressures or the lack thereof combine with policies set by regulators to determine the level of compliance when the wastewater is tested,” he told the colloquium. 

Using a broad data sample from 2013-23, isolating the regulatory interventions as distinct from the community activism component suggests that such agency interventions likely mitigated racial injustice; but at the same time could have actually exacerbated ethnicity-related injustice. 

“Similar to some of the other groundbreaking work presented here today, these findings regarding wastewater pollution regulation and other ongoing research studies in environmental economics have very important implications for policy making,” Dr. Earnhart said.