BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

181 Faculty Office Building Provo, UT 84602

801-422-4049 frandsen@byu.edu

https://economics.byu.edu/frandsen

EDUCATION Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010 Ph.D. Economics

Brigham Young University, 2004

B.S. Physics and Economics (Summa cum Laude and University Honors)

CITIZENSHIP USA GENDER MALE DATE OF BIRTH August 1980

LANGUAGES English (native), Hungarian (fluent)

FIELDS Primary Fields: Labor Economics, Econometrics

Secondary Fields: Health Economics, Public Finance

RELEVANT

POSITIONS

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, BYU

Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, Harvard Research Assistant to Professor Joshua Angrist

Management Consultant, McKinsey & Company

2012-present 2010-2012 2007-2008 2004-2006 FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS, AND AWARDS

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant ($15,000), 2009 MIT Economics Department Graduate Fellowship, 2006-2008

Best Graduate Teaching Assistant, MIT Economics Department, 2009,2010

PUBLICATIONS: “Treatment Effects with Censoring and Endogeneity,” forthcoming,

Journal of the American Statistical Association

“The Effects of Collective Bargaining Rights on Public Employee Compensation: Evidence from Teachers, Fire Fighters, and Police,”

Industrial and Labor Relations Review 69(1) January 2016

PUBLICATIONS

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PAPERS:

“Impacts of Unionization on Quality and Productivity: Regression Discontinuity Evidence From Nursing Homes,” Industrial and Labor

Relations Review, Industrial & Labor Relations Review. 68(4): 771-806

August 2015 (with Aaron Sojourner, Robert Town, David Grabowski, and Michelle Chen)

“Structuring Incentives within Organizations: The Case of Accountable Care Organizations,” The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations 31 August 2015, with James Rebitzer

“Care Fragmentation, Quality, and Healthcare Spending among Chronically Ill, Commercially Insured Patients,” American Journal of

Managed Care, 21(5):355-362 May 2015 (with Ashish Jha, Karen Joynt, and Jim Rebitzer)

“Randomization Inference in the Regression Discontinuity Design: An Application to Party Advantages in the U.S. Senate,” The Journal of

Causal Inference, 3(1):1-24 March 2015, (with Rocio Titiunik and Matias Cattaneo)

“Quantile Treatment Effects in the Regression Discontinuity Design,”

Journal of Econometrics 168(2) June 2012, with Markus Froelich and Blaise Melly

“Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health,” Journal of Public

Economics 94(11-12) December 2010, with Joshua Angrist and Stacey Chen

“Some Variations on Standard Income Measurement Error Models,”

Journal of Income Distribution, 2004, with James B. McDonald

“Acceleration of Free Electrons in a Symmetric Evanescent Wave,”

Laser Physics, 2006, with Justin B. Peatross and Scott A. Glasgow

“Testing Rank Similarity” (with Lars Lefgren)

We introduce a test of the rank invariance or rank similarity assumption common in treatment effects and instrumental variables models. The test probes the implication that the conditional distribution of ranks should be identical across treatment states using a regression-based test statistic. We apply the test to data from the Tennessee STAR class-size reduction experiment and JTPA job training program. We show that systematic slippages in rank can be important statistically and economically. We also illustrate the power of the rank similarity assumption for estimating and bounding structural parameters of interest in settings in which this assumption is plausible.

“Testing Censoring Point Independence”

Identification in censored regression models relies on the condition that censoring points are independent of latent outcomes, an assumption which may be questionable in many settings. This note proposes a test for this assumption based on a Kolmogorov-Smirnov-like test statistic comparing

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two different nonparametric estimators for the latent outcome cdf: the empirical cdf conditional on the censoring point exceeding (for right-censored data) the cdf evaluation point, and the Kaplan-Meier estimator. The test is consistent and has power against a wide variety of alternatives. Applying the test to data from several studies of censored outcomes suggests the assumption frequently fails.

“Party Bias in Union Representation Elections: Testing for Manipulation in the Regression Discontinuity Design When the Running Variable is Discrete”

Existing tests for manipulation of the running variable in discontinuity designs are inconsistent when the running variable is discrete. This paper proposes a test that is consistent and approximately UMP unbiased (local to the threshold) when the running variable is discrete. The test exploits the fact that if the discrete running variable--for example, age in quarters--is based on an underlying (but unobserved) variable--such as exact age--with a continuous density, then the observed frequency at the threshold has a known approximate conditional distribution. The resulting test is

approximately uniformly most powerful unbiased among tests that use only information at and immediately adjacent to the threshold. The proposed test is applied to vote tally distributions in union representation elections and reveals evidence of manipulation in close elections that is in favor of employers when Republicans control the NLRB and in favor of unions otherwise.

“The Surprising Impacts of Unionization on Establishments: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data”

Using administrative data matching individual worker earnings to employers in a regression discontinuity design based on close union representation elections, this study presents new evidence on the impacts of unionization on establishment and worker outcomes. The paper first shows evidence that close union elections are subject to nonrandom selection, with large discontinuities in pre-election characteristics at the majority threshold. Estimates accounting for this selection show, perhaps surprisingly, that unionization significantly and substantially decreases establishment-level payroll, employment, average worker earnings at the establishment, and the probability of establishment survival. Estimates show the decreases in payroll and earnings are driven by union impacts on the composition of workers at unionization establishments, with older and higher-paid workers more likely to leave and younger workers more likely to join or stay. Worker-level effects on the earnings of workers who stay are small. The distinction between the large negative establishment-level effects and small worker-establishment-level effects is interpreted in a model of employer and employee selection into union jobs.

“Why Unions Still Matter: The Effects of Unionization on the Distribution of Employee Earnings”

This paper estimates the causal effect of unionization on the distribution of employee earnings using a regression discontinuity design that links administrative records on individual earnings to union certification election results. The results suggest unions raise the lower end of the distribution by around 30 log points, with a much smaller effect on the upper tail, and a modest effect on average earnings. Comparing quantile treatment effects with average effects by baseline earnings quantile suggests the distributional

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effects correspond to individual-level earnings effects that vary by skill. Unionization also appears to reduce employment of the lowest skilled workers. These results are consistent with a model of union wage setting in which unions set wages so as to maximize the probability of certification, subject to a minimum profit constraint for the employer. The optimal union wage schedule pays low-skilled union members above marginal product but reduces the return to skill. The estimates suggest that about one quarter of the increase in the variance of log earnings from 1979 to 2009 can be accounted for by falling U.S. private sector unionization rates, a larger fraction than earlier studies have found.

“Weak Stochastic Increasingness, Rank Exchangeability, and Partial Identification of The Distribution of Treatment Effects”

This article develops bounds on the distribution of treatment effects under testable assumptions on the joint distribution of potential outcomes, namely weak stochastic increasingness, and rank exchangeability, and shows how to test the empirical restrictions implied by those assumptions. The resulting bounds sharpen the classical bounds based on Frechet-Hoeffiding limits. An empirical application on the impacts of charter schools shows the bounds are informative.

“Exact Nonparametric Inference for a Binary Endogenous Regressor” This paper describes a randomization-based inference procedure for the distribution or quantiles of potential outcomes for a binary treatment and instrument. The method imposes no parametric model for the treatment effect, and remains valid for small n, a weak instrument, or inference on tail quantiles, when conventional large-sample methods break down. The method is illustrated using simulations and data from a randomized trial of college student incentives and services.

“Health care costs, quality, and fragmentation: Instrumental variables evidence from the private sector” (with Leila Agha and Jim Rebitzer) This research aims to identify the causal effect of health care

fragmentation—defined as the dispersal of a patient’s care over multiple provider entities—on health care costs and quality. The identification strategy uses regional variation in the observed fragmentation of a Medicare population as an instrumental variable for fragmentation of privately insured patients. The empirical work exploits a unique dataset of medical and prescription drug claims from a population of chronically ill, privately insured patients.

“Collective bargaining rights and public employee pensions: Evidence from state and local government finances” (with Michael Webb) We use data from the universe of state and local governments in the United States on public employee pension plans to construct series for pension benefits and pension generosity as measured by the fraction of contributions made by the government. Combining the pension data with information on state collective bargaining rights for public employees, we exploit variation in the timing of state laws to identify and estimate the effect of collective bargaining rights on public employee pension generosity.

“Competition and Collusion among Gas Stations: Evidence from the Crowd” (with Lars Lefgren)

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Adjacent gas stations would be expected post similar gas prices under standard models of either Bertrand competition or collusive behavior. The posted price of an adjacent pair would not be expected depend on the distance to the next nearest gas station under Bertrand competition, however, but would under collusive behavior. We use a unique dataset derived from crowd-sourced information on gas station prices and locations to test this distinguishing implication and find evidence for significant collusion among gas stations.

“Osmosis, collaboration, and peer effects: Evidence from randomly assigned student groups” (with Lars Lefgren and Olga Bogach)

Are classroom peer effects driven by low-ability students benefitting from exposure to high-ability students by “osmosis” or by cooperation and collaboration in well-functioning groups? Using data on randomly assigned student groups we find little evidence that students’ performance responds to the ability of other students in their groups, but strong evidence that it does respond to the degree to which the group worked together.

“Long Term Effects of Military Service on the Distribution of Earnings”

I estimate the long term effect of military service on quantiles of earnings and education using the Vietnam draft lottery eligibility status as an

instrument. I compare the local quantile treatment effect estimator studied by Abadie, Angrist, and Imbens (2002) to the instrumental variables quantile regression technique developed by Chernozhukov and Hansen (2008). Ordinary quantile regression shows a large negative association between service in Vietnam and earnings of white men, with the effect increasing in magnitude for the upper quantiles. Quantile treatment effects estimates show the opposite pattern, although much smaller in magnitude, with a small negative effect at the lower end of the distribution, and a small positive effect at the upper end. This suggests the ordinary quantile result is due to heterogeneous selection effects. The two methods of quantile treatment effects estimation give similar results.

“Using Regression Discontinuity to Estimate the Distributional Effects of Educational Interventions,” with Raymond Guiteras

We estimate the quantile treatment effects of widespread remedial education interventions—summer school and grade retention—using two alternative sets of identifying assumptions and estimators. The first requires that the intervention not systematically alter the rank ordering of individuals. The second requires that exceeding the discontinuity threshold have a monotonic effect on treatment status. While the two estimators have different interpretations and require different assumptions, they both suggest that summer school and retention have a greater impact on the higher end of the distribution, conditional on being near the threshold.

“The Political Economy of Union Wage Setting”

This research takes the union’s primary objective to be growth of the union as an institution and the political survival of the union officers. The union’s primary instrument is the wage schedule, while the constraints are the employer’s investment and employment decisions. The optimal union wage schedule is derived as a function of the underlying distribution of workers’ human capital and preferences. Skewness in the distribution of ability as

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well as employer discretion over merit pay lead to an optimal union wage schedule which depresses the return to productivity with respect to the competitive sector, suggesting a wage-compressing effect of unionization.

Referee:

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics American Economic Review

Biometrics

Contemporary Economic Policy Econometric Theory

Economic Inquiry

Economics of Education Review Industrial and Labor Relations Review Industrial Relations

International Journal of Health Economics and Management Journal of Applied Econometrics

Journal of Business & Economic Statistics Journal of Econometrics

Journal of Experimental Political Science Journal of Health Economics

Journal of Human Resources Journal of Labor Economics Journal of Political Economy Journal of Public Economics

Journal of the American Statistical Association Journal of the European Economic Association Labour

MIT Press

National Science Foundation

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics Oxford Economic Papers

Quarterly Journal of Economics Quarterly Journal of Political Science Review of Economics and Statistics Social Science Quarterly

Presentations:

Columbia University Econometrics Seminar, NYC California Econometrics Conference, USC Econometric Society World Congress, Montreal

Western Economic Association Summer Meetings, Honolulu Harvard-MIT Econometrics Seminar, Cambridge

University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management Seminar, Minneapolis

UC Davis Econometrics Seminar, Davis

Econometric Society North American Winter Meetings, Boston AEA Annual Meetings, Boston

California Econometrics Conference, Stanford University

Econometric Society North American Summer Meetings, University of Minnesota

Econometric Society North American Summer Meetings, University of Southern California

Conference on Healthcare Markets, Kellogg School of Management,

October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 June 2015 Mary 2015 May 2015 May 2015 January 2015 January 2015 September 2014 June 2014 June 2013 May 2013

Evanston

AEA Annual Meetings, San Diego

Haas-Sloan Conference on the Law and Economics of Organizations, UC Berkeley

Econometric Society North American Summer Meetings, Northwestern University

American Society of Health Economists Annual Meeting, University of Minnesota

Northwestern Searle Center Conference on Government Unions in the United States, Chicago

Econometric Society North American Summer Meetings, Washington University, St. Louis

AEA Annual Meetings, Denver

Census Research Data Center Annual Conference, University of Maryland NBER Labor Studies Program Meeting, Cambridge, MA

Econometric Society World Congress, Shanghai

Society of Labor Economists Annual Meetings, University College London Econometric Society North American Summer Meetings, Boston University Society Of Labor Economists Annual Meetings, Cambridge, MA

Census Research Data Center Annual Conference, Duke University

January 2013 December 2012 June 2012 June 2012 October 2011 June 2011 January 2011 November 2010 October 2010 August 2010 June 2010 June 2009 May 2009 October 2008