Academic Enrichment Highlight: Dr. Prashant Bharadwaj Visit

This semester I attended a lecture by Dr. Prashant Bharadwaj of UC San Diego on his paper Statistical Discrimination. The presentation walked us through how economists build theoretical models—using tools like probability, expectations, and stochastic dominance—and then test those models against real-world data, in this case from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79).

While I didn’t expect to grasp every technical detail, I found the main logic of the model especially powerful: how statistical discrimination can be represented mathematically, and then empirically validated. It gave me a better appreciation of how theory and data connect, which is something I’m also working on in my own microeconomics research.

I appreciate how praxis-oriented the economics discipline truly is. This lecture allowed me to appreciate how math can lose its abstraction when used to explain real-world challenges.

By Chloe Jacobs

Photo caption: Me at the lecture in Cosby.