Parag A Pathak
Biographic Data
| ID | 5867527 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Parag A Pathak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Parag A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pathak |
| SIGNATURE | PATHAK P A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8621-3864 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms
The H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 dictates an annual allocation of 85,000 visas with 20,000 reserved for advanced-degree applicants. We represent the main requirements of this legislation as formal axioms and characterize visa allocation rules consistent with the axioms. Despite the precise number reserved, we show that the range of implementations satisfying these axioms can change the allocation of advanced-degree visas by as much as 14,000 in a…
Credible School Value-Added with Undersubscribed School Lotteries
We introduce two empirical strategies harnessing the randomness in school assignment mechanisms to measure school value-added. The first estimator controls for the probability of school assignment, treating take-up as ignorable. We test this assumption using randomness in assignments. The second approach uses assignments as instrumental variables (IVs) for low-dimensional models of value-added and forms empirical Bayes posteriors from these IV es…
Weighted Lottery to Equitably Allocate Scarce Supply of Covid-19 Monoclonal Antibody
The findings of this quality improvement study suggest an ADI-weighted lottery process to allocate scarce resources is feasible in a large health system and resulted in more drug allocation to and receipt of drug by individuals who reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although the ADI-weighted lottery also resulted in more drug allocation to Black individuals compared with an unweighted process, they were less likely to accept allocation and re…
Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones
We show that in the presence of admissions reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence of reserve seats at a school or increasing the school's reserve size weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we show that reserve and precedence adjustment…
Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp
In 2012, New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) became the first U.S. district to unify charter and traditional public school admissions in a single-offer assignment mechanism known as OneApp. The RSD also became the first district to use a mechanism based on Top Trading Cycles (TTC) in a real-life allocation problem. Since TTC was originally devised for settings in which agents have endowments, there is no formal rationale for TTC in school …
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
Who Benefits from Kipp
The nation's largest charter management organization is the K nowledge is P ower P rogram ( KIPP ). KIPP schools are emblematic of the N o E xcuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. N o E xcuses charter schools are sometimes said to targ…
Forced Sales and House Prices
This paper uses data on all house transactions in Massachusetts over the last 20 years to show that houses sold after foreclosure, or close in time to the death or bankruptcy of a seller, are sold at lower prices than other houses. Foreclosure discounts are on average at 27 percent of the value of a house. Moreover, foreclosures that take place within small local geographies of a house lower the price at which it is sold. Our preferred estimate i…
Pegs, Risk Management, and Financial Crises
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
Who Benefits from Kipp
The nation's largest charter management organization is the K nowledge is P ower P rogram ( KIPP ). KIPP schools are emblematic of the N o E xcuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. N o E xcuses charter schools are sometimes said to targ…
Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones
We show that in the presence of admissions reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence of reserve seats at a school or increasing the school's reserve size weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we show that reserve and precedence adjustment…
Pegs, Risk Management, and Financial Crises
Forced Sales and House Prices
This paper uses data on all house transactions in Massachusetts over the last 20 years to show that houses sold after foreclosure, or close in time to the death or bankruptcy of a seller, are sold at lower prices than other houses. Foreclosure discounts are on average at 27 percent of the value of a house. Moreover, foreclosures that take place within small local geographies of a house lower the price at which it is sold. Our preferred estimate i…
Who Benefits from Kipp
The nation's largest charter management organization is the K nowledge is P ower P rogram ( KIPP ). KIPP schools are emblematic of the N o E xcuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. N o E xcuses charter schools are sometimes said to targ…
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp
In 2012, New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) became the first U.S. district to unify charter and traditional public school admissions in a single-offer assignment mechanism known as OneApp. The RSD also became the first district to use a mechanism based on Top Trading Cycles (TTC) in a real-life allocation problem. Since TTC was originally devised for settings in which agents have endowments, there is no formal rationale for TTC in school …
Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones
We show that in the presence of admissions reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence of reserve seats at a school or increasing the school's reserve size weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we show that reserve and precedence adjustment…
Weighted Lottery to Equitably Allocate Scarce Supply of Covid-19 Monoclonal Antibody
The findings of this quality improvement study suggest an ADI-weighted lottery process to allocate scarce resources is feasible in a large health system and resulted in more drug allocation to and receipt of drug by individuals who reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although the ADI-weighted lottery also resulted in more drug allocation to Black individuals compared with an unweighted process, they were less likely to accept allocation and re…
Credible School Value-Added with Undersubscribed School Lotteries
We introduce two empirical strategies harnessing the randomness in school assignment mechanisms to measure school value-added. The first estimator controls for the probability of school assignment, treating take-up as ignorable. We test this assumption using randomness in assignments. The second approach uses assignments as instrumental variables (IVs) for low-dimensional models of value-added and forms empirical Bayes posteriors from these IV es…
Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms
The H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 dictates an annual allocation of 85,000 visas with 20,000 reserved for advanced-degree applicants. We represent the main requirements of this legislation as formal axioms and characterize visa allocation rules consistent with the axioms. Despite the precise number reserved, we show that the range of implementations satisfying these axioms can change the allocation of advanced-degree visas by as much as 14,000 in a…
Economics (5 works) · Political science (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Finance (3 works) · Finance (3 works) · Law (3 works) · School Choice and Performance (3 works) · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis (2 works) · Game Theory and Voting Systems (2 works) · Housing Market and Economics (2 works)