generating real persistent effects of monetary shocks how much nominal rigidity do we really need abstract this paper attempts to assess whether money can generate persistent economic fluctuations in dynamic general equilibrium models of the business cycle we show that a small nominal friction in the goods market can make the response of output to monetary shocks large and persistent if it is amplified by real wage rigidity in the labor market we also argue that for plausible levels of real wage rigidity a small degree of nominal stickiness is sufficient for money to produce economic fluctuations as persistent as those observed in the data

affirmative action in higher education how do admission and financial aid rules affect future earnings this paper addresses how changing the admission and financial aid rules at colleges affects future earnings i estimate a structural model of the following decisions by individuals where to submit applications which school to attend and what field to study the model also includes decisions by schools as to which students to accept and how much financial aid to offer simulating how black educational choices would change were they to face the white admission and aid rules shows that race based advantages had little effect on earnings however removing race based advantages does affect black educational outcomes in particular removing advantages in admissions substantially decreases the number of black students at top tier schools while removing advantages in financial aid causes a decrease in the number of blacks who attend college

assessing policies to equalize opportunity using an equilibrium model of educational and occupational choices abstract the inter generational correlation of education in the u s is tremendous for instance in psid data from 1990 young males with college educated parents had a 70 chance of attending college but those with high school drop out parents had only a 15 chance in this paper we analyze the impact of college attendance bonus schemes designed to increase college attendance rates and pv of lifetime income of youth from disadvantaged backgrounds of course policies that increase the supply of skilled labor may reduce the college wage premium see heckman et al heckman james lochner lance and taber christopher explaining rising wage inequality explorations with a dynamic equilibrium model of labor earnings with heterogeneous agents review of economic dynamics 1 1998a 1 58 heckman james lochner lance and taber christopher general equilibrium treatment effects a study of tuition policy american economic review 88 2 1998b 381 386 this may have the unintended consequence of wiping out most of the gains to the targeted groups the strength of such equilibrium effects on wages depends on the substitutability between different types of labor thus it is important to evaluate education subsidies within an equilibrium framework that allows for flexible patterns of substitution across factor inputs this is exactly what we do here using an overlapping generations equilibrium model of the u s labor market fit to psid data from 1968 to 1996 the model allows for imperfect substitution among types of labor differentiated by education gender age and ten 1 digit level occupations a much finer differentiation than has been considered in prior work we find that very large college attendance bonuses are necessary to equate college attendance rates between youth whose parents had only high school degrees or were high school dropouts and youth whose parents attended at least some college the size of these bonuses far exceeds any reasonable measure of college costs suggesting the costs the bonuses overcome are primarily psychic or effort costs for example youth from disadvantaged backgrounds may be poorly prepared for college this suggests that bonuses targeted at college age youth are probably a very inefficient way to reduce inequality earlier intervention is likely called for

choosing the field of study in postsecondary education do expected earnings matter abstract this paper examines the determinants of the choice of the college major when the length of studies and future earnings are uncertain we estimate a three stage schooling decision model focusing on the effect of expected earnings on major choice we control for dynamic selection through the use of mixture distributions exploiting variations across the french business cycle in the relative returns to the majors our results yield a very low though significant elasticity of major choice to expected earnings this suggests that at least for the french university context nonpecuniary factors are a key determinant of schooling choices

eliminating race differences in school attainment and labor market success in this article we provide quantitative evidence on the effects of monetary incentive schemes designed to reduce racial differences in school attainment and earnings our analysis is based on the structural estimation of a dynamic model of schooling work and occupational choice decisions over the life cycle we consider two recent proposals that although not specifically targeted to blacks can be expected to have differential racial impacts one proposal suggested by robert reich provides a high school graduation bonus to youths from lower income families the other suggested by edmund phelps provides wage subsidies to low wage workers

general equilibrium treatment effects a study of tuition policy this paper defines and estimates general equilibrium treatment effects the conventional approach in the literature on treatment effects ignores interactions among individuals induced by the policy interventions being studied focusing on the impact of tuition policy and using estimates from our dynamic overlapping generations general equilibrium model of capital and human capital formation we find that general equilibrium impacts of tuition on college enrollment are an order of magnitude smaller than those reported in the literature on microeconomic treatment effects the assumptions used to justify the late parameter in a partial equilibrium setting do not hold in a general equilibrium setting policy changes induce two way flows we extend the late concept to a general equilibrium setting we present a more comprehensive evaluation to program evaluation by considering both the tax and benefit consequences of the program being evaluated and placing the analysis in a market setting this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

conditional choice probability estimation of dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneity we adapt the expectation maximization algorithm to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity into conditional choice probability ccp estimators of dynamic discrete choice problems the unobserved heterogeneity can be time invariant or follow a markov chain by developing a class of problems where the difference in future value terms depends on a few conditional choice probabilities we extend the class of dynamic optimization problems where ccp estimators provide a computationally cheap alternative to full solution methods monte carlo results confirm that our algorithms perform quite well both in terms of computational time and in the precision of the parameter estimates

affirmative action in education evidence from engineering college admissions in india abstract this paper examines an affirmative action program for lower caste groups in engineering colleges in india we study both the targeting properties of the program and its implications for labor market outcomes we find that affirmative action successfully targets the financially disadvantaged the upper caste applicants that are displaced by affirmative action come from a richer economic background than the lower caste applicants that are displacing them targeting by caste however may lead to the exclusion of other disadvantaged groups for example caste based targeting reduces the overall number of females entering engineering colleges we find that despite poor entrance exam scores lower caste entrants obtain a positive return to admission our estimates however also suggest that these gains may come at an absolute cost because the income losses experienced by displaced upper caste applicants are larger than the income gains experienced by displacing lower caste students limited sample sizes in our preferred econometric specifications however prevent us from drawing strong conclusions from these labor market findings

coverage of retail stores and discrete choice models of demand estimating price elasticities and welfare effects consumers choice set of products within stores can be limited ackerberg and rysman 2005 address this problem by modeling unobserved consumer preferences over products and retail stores leading to augmented demand speci cations having carbonated soft drink product level data where we observe products store coverage we are able to estimate their logit nested logit and random coe cient logit speci cations of demand in a structural model of equilibrium allowing for store coverage turns out to have a very signi cant impact on the estimated structural parameters and on the predictive power of the model taking these estimated structural parameters we perform a counterfactual whereby stores carry all products in the market we nd systematic increases in price elasticities and welfare in our new equilibrium competition in markets is more curtailed than normally assumed in structural models of industries

test scores educational opportunities and individual choice abstract a model combining student preferences for college with university admissions decisions is estimated to provide information on the role of test scores in the determination of post secondary educational opportunities in the u s in contrast to implications of much of the recent criticism of tests and their use we find that scholastic aptitude test scores are more strongly related to student application and choice of college quality than to college admissions decisions in addition although there is a substantial correlation between test scores and high school performance we find that both post secondary school preferences and ultimate opportunities are related as much to performance in high school as to test scores themselves although sat scores certainly exclude some persons from schools our findings indicate that they do not represent an overriding constraint on the college opportunities of high school graduates

veto based delegation in a principal agent model with hidden information and no monetary transfers i establish the veto power principle any incentive compatible outcome can be implemented through veto based delegation with an endogenously chosen default decision this result demonstrates the exact nature of commitment powers required by the principal 1 to design the default outcome and 2 to ensure that she has almost no formal control over the agent s decisions

does it pay to attend an elite private college cross cohort evidence on the effects of college type on earnings although a substantial and rising labor market premium is associated with college attendance in general little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different types and across time in this paper we explicitly model high school students choice of college type characterized by selectivity and control based on individual and family characteristics including ability and parental economic status and an estimate of the net costs of attendance we estimate selectivity corrected outcome equations using data from both the national longitudinal study of the high school class of 1972 and high school and beyond which permit us to determine the effects of college quality on wages and earnings and how this effect varies across time even after controlling for selection effects strong evidence emerges of a significant economic return to attending an elite private institution and some evidence suggests this premium has increased over time

new evidence on the economic determinants of postsecondary schooling choices the effects of tuition costs financial aid and individual attributes on college choice are analyzed using a conditional logit model the results confirm that financial aid can be an important determinant of postsecondary school attendance and that individual academic ability relative to the academic standards of a college is an important determinant of which of available college alternatives is chosen

life cycle schooling and dynamic selection bias models and evidence for five cohorts of american males this paper examines an empirical regularity found in many societies that family influences on the probability of transiting from one grade level to the next diminish at higher levels of education we examine the statistical model used to establish the empirical regularity and the intuitive behavioral interpretation often used to rationalize it we show that the implicit economic model assumes myopia the intuitive interpretive model is identified only by imposing arbitrary distributional assumptions onto the data we produce an alternative choice theoretic model with fewer parameters that rationalizes the same data and is not based on arbitrary distributional assumptions

the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic discrete choice models a survey our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the united states congress we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset given estimates of the structural model we

market power and price discrimination in the u s market for higher education the main purpose of this paper is to estimate an equilibrium model of private and public school competition that can generate realistic pricing patterns for private universities in the u s we show that the parameters of the model are identified and can be estimated using a semi parametric estimator given data from the npsas we find substantial price discrimination within colleges we estimate that a 10 000 increase in family income increases tuition at private schools by on average 210 to 510 a one standard deviation increase in ability decreases tuition by approximately 920 to 1 960 depending on the selectivity of the college discounts for minority students range between 110 and 5 750

changes in college skills and the rise in the college wage premium the college wage premium for new labor market entrants rose sharply during the 1980s we ask how much of this change arose from changes in the skill level of the typical college graduate we find that skills attained prior to college as measured by standardized test scores and high school grades had no effect on the change in the college wage premium for men in contrast the returns to math ability rose considerably for women failing to account for math skills thus substantially overstates the growth in the female college wage premium skills acquired in college as reflected in the distribution of students across majors had important effects on the relative wages of men the trend away from low skill subjects such as education and toward high skill subjects such as engineering accounts for one fourth of the rise in the male college wage premium

does the river spill over estimating the economic returns to attending a racially diverse college t he attainment of a diverse student body is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education the atmosphere of speculation experiment and creation so essential to the quality of higher education is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body lewis powell regents of the university of california v bakke 438 u s 265 1978 pp 311 12 quoting sweezy v new hampshire 354 u s 234 1957 p 263 i introduction for more than a quarter century the belief that diversity contributes to the quality of undergraduate and graduate education has motivated court opinions and college policies regarding racial preferences in admissions l surprisingly the social sciences have provided very little evidence to support or refute this claim such evidence would clearly be of great interest both to policy makers and to scholars conducting more general studies of the impacts of affirmative action on higher education 2 in the absence of programs employing random assignment of individuals to campuses with varying degrees of racial diversity any evidence offered on this question will be subject to criticism that diversity may correlate with unobserved determinants of individual outcomes 3 in such a scenario policy makers face an unenviable choice of making uninformed decisions or paying attention to potentially imperfect research findings this article does not claim to solve all the issues involved in the identification of racial diversity effects as described below however we use a promising data source the college and beyond c b data set and a variety of identification strategies to gain some degree of insight into the question of whether exposure to diversity is beneficial for college students we find no evidence of a positive link between the two variables and the imperfections of our research design most likely lead us to overstate the likelihood that there is such a link we begin by translating powell s hypothesis into economic terms building on the existing concepts of human capital becker 1964 and ethnic capital borjas 1992 1995 and inspired by lazear s 1995 model of cultural assimilation we introduce the concept of diversity capital we define diversity capital as a measure of an individual s ability to create surplus in interactions with individuals of different racial ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds in this context the beliefs articulated by lewis powell in 1978 translate into a hypothesis that a diverse student body contributes directly or indirectly to diversity capital with this proposed causal mechanism in mind we focus our empirical analysis on a direct estimation of the relationship between minority representation and the postgraduation outcomes of undergraduates on elite campuses although our model of the returns to collegiate diversity is simple empirical estimation of the returns to diversity is complicated by an omitted variable problem college racial composition may correlate with unobserved institution level components of education quality or with individual level determinants of productivity in our sample of selective colleges the sign of this bias is most likely positive among selective colleges those matriculating the students with the highest sat scores also tend to have higher minority representation if student sat scores are imperfectly but positively correlated with unobserved determinants of productivity our estimates will exhibit a positive bias and thus overstate the case that exposure to underrepresented minorities urms improves postgraduate outcomes 4 in one set of specifications we allow the effect of exposure to diversity to vary with the relative position of individual students and peers in the sat score distribution in general we find that the type of diversity increase brought about by affirmative action policies which brings lower scoring minority students into potential contact with higher scoring majority race students is if anything detrimental to majority race students

technical note pricing under the nested attraction model with a multistage choice structure we develop a solution approach to the centralized pricing problem of a nested attraction model with a multistage tree structure we identify conditions under which the optimal solution can be uniquely determined and we characterize the optimal solution as a fixed point of a single variable in the special case of a multistage nested logit model we show the impact of asymmetry in price sensitivity and adjustment index also known as the dissimilarity index and we derive a closed form solution when the tree structure is symmetric many existing results in the literature regarding the single or two stage nested attraction model are shown to be special cases of the results we have derived we show that the equal markup property which holds for the single stage logit model with symmetric price sensitivity in general does not hold for products that do not share the same immediate parent node in the nested choice structure even when price sensitivities are the same for all products

predicted future earnings and choice of college major using data from the national longitudinal survey of young men the author of this paper examines the relationship between predicted future earnings for five broad fields of study and college students choice of major conditional logit models of major choice that incorporate alternative predicted earnings variables are specified and estimated the results indicate that holding family background characteristics constant individuals are likely to choose majors offering greater streams of future earnings rather than as some have argued majors with higher beginning earnings at the time of the choice it is also found that earnings profiles corrected for self selection bias have flattened for more recent graduates in business liberal arts and education the life cycle earnings in these disciplines appear to be more severely depressed than those in science and engineering

the demand for and return to education when education outcomes are uncertain this article treats education as a sequential choice that is made under uncertainty a simple model is used to explore the effects of ability high school preparation preferences for schooling the borrowing rate and ex post payoffs to college on the probability of various post secondary college outcomes and the ex ante return to starting college the model motivates an empirical method of accounting for uncertainty about educational outcomes and for nonlinearity in the relationship between years of education and earnings when estimating the expected return to the first year of college

affirmative action and the quality fit trade off this paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools focusing especially on the trade off between institutional quality and the fit between a school and a student we discuss the conditions under which affirmative action for underrepresented minorities urm could help or harm their educational outcomes we provide descriptive evidence on the extent of affirmative action in law schools as well as a critical review of the contentious literature on how affirmative action affects urm law school student performance our review then discusses affirmative action in undergraduate admissions focusing on the effects such admissions preferences have on college quality graduation rates college major and earnings we conclude by examining the evidence on percent plans as a replacement for affirmative action

income segregation and intergenerational mobility across colleges in the united states we construct publicly available statistics on parents incomes and students earnings outcomes for each college in the united states using deidentified data from tax records these statistics reveal that the degree of parental income segregation across colleges is very high similar to that across neighborhoods differences in postcollege earnings between children from low and high income families are much smaller among students who attend the same college than across colleges colleges with the best earnings outcomes predominantly enroll students from high income families although a few mid tier public colleges have both low parent income levels and high student earnings linking these income data to sat and act scores we simulate how changes in the allocation of students to colleges affect segregation and intergenerational mobility equalizing application admission and matriculation rates across parental income groups conditional on test scores would reduce segregation substantially primarily by increasing the representation of middle class students at more selective colleges however it would have little effect on the fraction of low income students at elite private colleges because there are relatively few students from low income families with sufficiently high sat act scores differences in parental income distributions across colleges could be eliminated by giving low and middle income students a sliding scale preference in the application and admissions process similar to that implicitly given to legacy students at elite private colleges assuming that 80 of observational differences in students earnings conditional on test scores race and parental income are due to colleges causal effects a strong assumption but one consistent with prior work such changes could reduce intergenerational income persistence among college students by about 25 we conclude that changing how students are allocated to colleges could substantially reduce segregation and increase intergenerational mobility even without changing colleges educational programs

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

fostering educational enrolment through subsidies the issue of timing summary the purpose of this paper is to build a dynamic structural model of educational choices in which cognitive skills shape decisions the model is estimated by maximum likelihood using cohort data where individuals are observed from birth to the middle of their working life these data are unique in that they include cognitive skills test scores collected as early as age 7 we then investigate how alternative policies foster educational enrolment in particular we simulate the effect of two subsidies different in the timing of disbursement the first consists of grants assigned directly to individuals aged between 16 and 18 the second is assigned to the parents earlier on when the cohort is still in its childhood the latter subsidy affects cognitive skills accumulation and in turn educational choices our results suggest that a grant fosters enrolment at the lowest cost but the parental income subsidy generates more welfare as measured by a class of social welfare functions nevertheless these differences in costs and welfare are small overall the results reinforce the view that government investments in cognitive skill accumulation during childhood are worthwhile however the results also indicate that such investments should be well structured to ensure a high return copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

college selectivity and earnings this article shows that college performance and selectivity have significant effects on earnings it suggests that work that does not include college performance overstates the effect of college se