PUBLICATIONS

The Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from the Golden Age of Upward Mobility (with David Card and Lowell Taylor), Journal of Labor Economics, 40: S1, S39-S95. 

Summaries: Vox, https://voxeu.org/article/public-education-and-intergenerational-mobility 

NBER Digest https://www.nber.org/digest/nov18/w25000.shtml 

We use 1940 Census data to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital for children born in the 1920s and educated during an era of expanding but unequally distributed public school resources. Looking at the gains in educational attainment between parents and children, we document lower average mobility rates for blacks than whites, but wide variation across states and counties for both races. We show that schooling choices of white children were highly responsive to the quality of local schools, with bigger effects for the children of less-educated parents. We then narrow our focus to black families in the South, where state-wide minimum teacher salary laws created sharp differences in teacher wages between adjacent counties. These differences had large impacts on schooling attainment, suggesting an important causal role for school quality in mediating upward mobility.

Heterogeneity across Families in the Impact of Compulsory Schooling Laws, 2021. Economica, 88: 399-429

This paper aims to reconcile diverging results in the literature on the effects of compulsory schooling reforms on earnings. I point out, through a simple model of human capital accumulation, the importance of identifying parental education information to better target the set of potential compliers. Using detailed parental background data, the empirical analysis uncovers the large and positive effects of a French school leaving age reform previously shown to have produced zero and statistically insignificant effects on the earnings of impacted cohorts. The analysis suggests that identifying parental education is likely a crucial effort in analyzing contemporary compulsory schooling policies.

ACCEPTED ARTICLES / FORTHCOMING

The Rise of For-Profit Higher Education: A General Equilibrium Analysis (with Ioana Schiopu) , CESifo Working Paper No. 9134 (accepted for publication), The RAND Journal of Economics)

In recent decades, for-profit colleges have risen to prominence in U.S. higher education policy. We develop a general equilibrium model of the four-year college market, focusing on the competition between the fast-rising for-profit college sector and the public and not-for-profit sectors. The model captures competing profit maximization and academic quality objectives, the markets for traditional and nontraditional students, and variation in institutional financial aid policies and student loan balances. In calibration, the model predicts substantially different levels of tuition, instructional spending and average student body abilities, which match data counterparts well. We conduct counterfactual analyses relevant to recent U.S. policy debates, including subsidy cuts at public colleges, increases in federal financial aid, and ``gainful employment" legislation that links access to federal funding for universities to their graduates' debt-to-earnings ratios. 

WORKING PAPERS

The Impact of Female Teachers on Female Students' Lifetime Well-Being (with David Card, Seth G. Sanders, Lowell Taylor and Victoria Udalova), NBER Working Paper No. 30430, (revisions requested, Journal of Political Economy)

It is widely believed that female students benefit from being taught by female teachers, particularly when those teachers serve as counter-stereotypical role models. We study education in rural areas of the US circa 1940--a setting in which there were few professional female exemplars other than teachers--and find that female students were more successful when their primary-school teachers were disproportionately female. Impacts are lifelong: female students taught by female teachers were more likely to move up the educational ladder by completing high school and attending college, and had higher lifetime family income and increased longevity.

The G.I. Bill and Underemployment , IZA Discussion Paper 16444

While the ill luck of graduating during a recession is understood to potentially result in job mismatch, less is known about the drivers of underemployment outside of business cycles. This paper shows that the college subsidy investments undertaken as part of the WWII, Vietnam War, and Post-9/11 G.I. Bills led to persistent and sizable increases in the underemployment rate among bachelor’s degree holders. In turn, underemployment explains approximately a quarter of the earnings penalty experienced by recent college educated veterans, over and above lost labor market experience, lower rates of graduate school completion and combat exposure effects.

School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi Circa 1940 (with David Card, Leah Clark and Lowell Taylor), IZA Discussion Paper 16994 and NBER Working Paper 32496 (revisions requested, Journal of Public Economics) 

Summaries: NBER Digest  Media coverage:    Education Week    Fordham Institute

A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state’s Black students - an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the state’s preexisting per capita fund, and the resulting high expenditures on white students rendered these districts ineligible for the equalization program. Thus, while Black students residing in majority white districts benefitted from increased spending and standards for Black schools, those in majority-Black districts continued to experience extremely low – and even worsening – school funding. We model the processes that led the so-called equalization policy to create disparities in schooling resources for Black students, and estimate effects on Black children using both a neighboring-counties design and an IV strategy. We find that local educational spending had large impacts on Black enrollment rates, as reported in the 1940 census, with Black educational attainment increasing in marginal spending. Finally, we link the 1940 and 2000 censuses to show that Black children exposed to higher levels of school expenditures had significantly more completed schooling and higher income late in life. 

"Planning for Family Succession" (with Robert A. Miller), IZA Discussion Paper No. 17800

Commentary/ Summary IZA World of Labor

Sons succeed their exiting CEO parents more often than daughters. How do entrepreneurial families reach this gender imbalance, and how does it affect the prospects of their firms and their offspring? Using Finnish administrative data on firms linked to population register data on shareholders and their extended families, we trace the steps leading to the succession decision, and its outcomes. We examine fertility patterns, finding evidence of son preference in natural births and adoptions by entrepreneurs.  In families that appear to follow son-biased fertility stopping rules, we also find noticeable differences in human capital accumulation between sons and daughters. The transmission of human capital is also mediated by the extent to which women are employed in the industry of the entrepreneur parent. In particular, daughters have a higher chance of being groomed for succession if the family firm operates in a female-dominated industry. Gaps in income, board membership, and share ownership between sons and daughters of exiting CEOs emerge well before succession, and their magnitude also varies by industry gender composition. Turning to firm outcomes, we find evidence that other family members, but not the children of exiting CEOs, appear to diminish firm performance relative to the results of professional CEOs. Overall, our results show family succession is a protracted process that begins with the birth of the first child. 

WORK IN PROGRESS

"Educational Attainment, Field of Study and Labor Market Outcomes" (with Arnaud Maurel, Andrew Shephard and Pengpeng Xiao)

"Borrowing for Success?  Studying the Loan Taking Behavior of Students in Response to Financial Incentives" (with Tuomas Kosonen, Tiina Kuuppelomäki, Antoine Levy, Jonathan Meer and  Akseli Palomäki)

"The role of firms in shaping the work, study, and graduation choices of student employees" 

"Education and Mortality: Evidence for the Silent Generation from Linked Census and Administrative Data" (with Anna Malinovskaya and Evan Taylor) 

"The long run effects of Aid To Dependent Children" (with David Card, Leah Clark, Seth Sanders and Lowell Taylor)

"Wealth Inequality in Finland" (with Stephanie Ettmeier, Chi Hyun Kim, Timm Prein, and Oskari Vähämaa) 

"Tuition Subsidies and Overeducation"  

"The secular decline in teen employment: the role of compulsory schooling laws and work permits" 

PEER-REVIEWED POLICY RESEARCH

“The largest drop in income inequality in the European Union during the Great Recession: Romania‘s puzzling case”, Conditions of Work and Employment Series, No.51 , International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2014.

“Decent Work policy options for the Romanian economy,” Policy Integration Department Working Papers, No.105, International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2012.