Search Results
Working Paper
State Merit Aid Programs and Youth Labor Market Attachment
This paper examines the impact of state merit-aid programs on the labor market attachment of high school-aged youths. The labor force participation rate of teenagers has fallen substantially in recent decades, coinciding with the introduction of merit-aid programs. These programs reduce the price of attending an in-state public college or university for high-achieving students and have the potential to influence students' allocation of time and effort between labor market activities, human capital development, and other forms of leisure. We examine the influence of these programs based on ...
Working Paper
Disinvesting in the future?: a comprehensive examination of the effects of state appropriations for public higher education
In aggregate, state appropriations are the largest revenue source for public higher education in the United States. However, these appropriations have significantly declined over past decades, drawing serious concerns about the potential negative impact on schools and students. This paper provides a more comprehensive study of the effects of state appropriations than previous research, while explicitly exploring and testing the heterogeneity of the effects by institutional type. It finds strong evidence of the negative effects of state appropriation cuts in the areas of tuition and fees, ...
Working Paper
Explaining Stagnation in the College Wage Premium
After growing substantially during the 1980s through the early 2000s, the college wage premium more recently has been largely unchanged, or stagnant. We extend the canonical production-function model of skill premiums to assess supply and demand contributions to the slowdown in college wage premium, using annual CPS ASEC data from the early 1960s through 2023. To account for the rising importance of women in the college educated workforce, we estimate a hybrid model that incorporates components that are disaggregated by age and gender. We also allow for non-linearities and changes over time ...
Journal Article
Patience and Credit Constraints in Education
The role of ability (a cognitive trait) and patience (a non-cognitive trait) for life outcomes, such as education, is well documented. Similarly, the impact of credit constraints on education decisions is the subject of a vast literature. I take stock of these strands of the literature and ask: how do patience and ability interact with a credit constraint in determining college attainment? I analyze a stylized model of the college decision where individuals are differentiated by their ability and their patience, which is represented by their discount factor. I introduce two different features ...
Journal Article
Student Loan Debt: Can Parental College Savings Help?
Postsecondary education costs in the United States today are rising with an increasing shift from societal responsibility to individual burden, thereby driving greater student borrowing. Evidence suggests that (i) such student debt may have undesirable educational effects and potentially jeopardize household balance sheets and (ii) student loans may better support educational attainment and economic mobility if accompanied by other, non-repayable financial awards. However, given declines in need-based aid and falling state support for postsecondary costs, policymakers and parents alike have ...
Journal Article
Work, Leisure, and Family: From the Silent Generation to Millennials
This article analyzes the changes in family structure, fertility behavior, and the division of labor within the household from the Silent generation (cohort born in 1940-49) to the Millennial generation (cohort born in 1980-89). Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article documents the main trends and life-cycle profiles for each generation. The main findings are that (i) the wage-age profile has been shifting down over generations, especially for Millennial men; (ii) the returns to a four-year college degree or higher for men have increased for all generations; (iii) ...
Working Paper
Reversal of Gender Gaps in Child Development: Evidence from Young Children in India
This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing better than boys at age 5 but thereafter following the general pattern in India of boys performing better.
Working Paper
Parents, Patience, and Persistence: A Novel Theory of Intergenerational College Attainment
We present a theory of intergenerational persistence in college attainment (a Bachelor's degree, BD) guided by two well-documented empirical regularities: (i) patient individuals are more likely to be college graduates and (ii) patience persists across generations because parents choose to transmit it to their children, among other non-cognitive traits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formalize and evaluate these mechanisms in a general equilibrium model. In the model, (i) and (ii) are endogenous outcomes implying college persistence. "Standard mechanisms," i.e., credit ...
Working Paper
Parents, Patience, and Persistence: A Novel Theory of Intergenerational College Attainment
We present a theory of intergenerational persistence in college attainment (a Bachelors degree, BD) guided by two well-documented empirical regularities: (i) patient individuals are more likely to be college graduates and (ii) patience persists across generations because parents choose to transmit it to their children, among other non-cognitive traits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formalize and evaluate these mechanisms in a general equilibrium model. In the model, (i) and (ii) are endogenous outcomes implying college persistence. Standard mechanisms, i.e., credit ...
Working Paper
Parents, Patience, and Persistence: A Novel Theory of Intergenerational College Attainment
We present a theory of intergenerational persistence in college attainment (a bachelor’s degree, BD) guided by two well-documented empirical regularities: (i) patient individuals are more likely to be college graduates, and (ii) patience persists across generations because parents choose to transmit it, along with other non-cognitive traits, to their children. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formalize and evaluate these mechanisms in a general equilibrium model. In the model, (i) and (ii) are endogenous outcomes implying college persistence. “Standard mechanisms”, ...