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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | February 1, 2007

In recognition of their timely and influential work, Swarthmore professors Rob Hollister and Frederic Pryor recently received nationally renowned awards for their lifetime of research in the fields of economics and public policy.

Professor Emeritus Frederic Pryor was honored by the Association of Comparative Economic Studies with the J. Michael Montias Prize for “Best Economics Article” in the Journal of Comparative Economics. The article was distinguished for its nuanced discussion of market economic systems and the economic measures of success employed to evaluate the efficiency of these systems.

“This is just sort of a culmination of a lot of work that I had done in the past,” Pryor said, referring to his approximately 40 years of study in the field of economics.

Pryor explained that the framework for his research has been informed by several pertinent questions that have captured the attention of contemporary economists. “What is an economic system? What difference does it make? Why does a country have a particular system?”

Pryor described the line of inquiry that has motivated his work in the field. Professor of Economics Mark Kuperberg praised his colleague’s talent for applying his insight to obscure yet pressing societal problems. “He’s always thinking of new things to investigate.” Although Pryor’s early work concerned the now-defunct Soviet Union, “He made this nice transition … into [analyzing] U.S. labor markets even though the field that he originally had been in had disappeared. It’s unusual to have your field disappear,” Kuperberg said.

One of the aspects that distinguished Pryor’s recent work with economic systems was his innovative adaptation of an engineering technique to investigate an economic problem. After Pryor attended a lecture in which Associate Professor of Engineering Bruce Maxwell demonstrated the technique, it occurred to the economist that the same technique could be applied to the study of primitive tribal economics.

“I borrowed a technique he had used to solve an engineering problem to look at an economics problem,” Pryor said. “I was using a totally new method of describing economic systems…[It] provided the key that I previously had been missing.”

Maxwell’s engineering work inspired Pryor to utilize cluster analysis as “a new approach to economic systems.” While many economists are content to examine one or two criteria of an economic system, Pryor’s complex technique facilitated the analysis of up to 100 criteria in the same study, “a much broader view of economic systems.”

As Pryor discusses in the paper, his work centers on “testing this method against industrialized nations and then trying to see what impact the economic system had on various indicators of economic success. This gives an unambiguous definition of the economic system.”

Rob Hollister was commended with the Peter H. Rossi Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) for his life-long achievements in the advancement of social and economic program evaluation.

Hollister has been “a big proponent of experiments as opposed to regression analysis,” according to his colleague, Kuperberg.

Hollister affirmed that he has always favored large-scale experiments over statistical methods of analysis. “Basically, a lot of what I have done over the past 30 years has been related to doing large social experiments. An experiment in this case is like a trial for a clinical drug,” he said.

Hollister supervised experiments that involved a control group, which was external to the social program being evaluated, and an experimental group, that would be subject to various conditions on the basis of random assignment. According to Hollister, random assignment was a critical factor in the experiment’s success because it enabled him to attribute the failure or success of individual subjects to particular components of the social program.

“The first major one … was on something called the negative income tax, which was meant to substitute for welfare. There were a series of them that followed after that, including housing allowance, alternative forms of health insurance, and training programs,” Hollister said. Hollister then evaluated these conditions for “their effectiveness on various parts of the population,” he said.

In the 1960s Hollister performed similar analyses while serving as a staff economist, and later, a chief, in the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, as part of the War on Poverty effort. Their objective was to “assess what kinds of programs would be most effective in helping low-income people.”

Hollister’s evaluation of social policies extended to educational programs as well. Much of his work on these matters was accomplished in cooperation with the Department of Education.

According to Hollister, “higher quality studies” are necessary to evaluate current educational standards for their effectiveness. Hollister said that the federal government can promote such research by funding randomized trials and evaluations of curriculum, technology and after-school programs.

One of Hollister’s social experiments was designed to determine whether school vouchers were effective as incentives for improvement in New York City schools. With limited funds, the experiment followed both a control group and an experimental group for several years, after which the parents of students in the experimental group selected the particular schools that they wanted their children to attend.

Hollister’s initial prediction was that the effect of the school vouchers would be to increase competition between schools, which would correspond to improved aggregate performance in the schools under consideration. But ultimately, this hypothesis was not supported by the study’s results.

“It’s a two-sided kind of contribution,” Hollister said of the results. “We can either find that a policy or program is effective or not effective. But we can also discover that things we generally believed to be effective are in fact ineffective,” he said.

“He’s an economics powerhouse with a very distinct style,” Dan Hammer ‘07, a student who took Hollister’s Labor and Social Economics seminar last semester, said. According to his Kuperberg, Hollister “was at the absolute forefront” of a paradigm shift that now dominates the work of his peers. “The entire economics field, across the board, has now totally moved over to his view,” Kuperberg said of Hollister’s work.

Hammer recalled hearing Hollister discuss his ongoing research over the course of the semester. “It came up quite a bit in the seminar,” Hammer said of the work for which Hollister was honored with the Rossi Award. “He’s a very receptive, very knowledgeable professor,” Hammer said.

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