Research
Selected Working Papers:
Estimating the Perceived Returns to College, Under Review
Abstract: The primary determinant of an individual's college attendance is their perceived lifetime return to college. I infer agents' perceived returns by exploiting the dollar-for-dollar relationship between perceived returns and tuition costs in a binary choice model of college attendance. This method has the advantage of estimating perceived returns in terms of compensating variation without assuming rational expectations on actual returns. Estimating the model using both maximum likelihood and moment inequalities, I find that the scale of the distribution of perceived returns is an order of magnitude lower than past work has found when assuming rational expectations on income returns. The low variance I find in perceived returns implies high responses to financial aid. I predict a 2.6 percentage point increase in college attendance from a $1,000 universal annual tuition subsidy, which is consistent with quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of tuition assistance on college attendance. Because I estimate the complete distribution of perceived returns, my results can be used to predict heterogeneous effects of counterfactual financial aid policies.
Peer Effects in University Housing: Evidence from Fuzzy Central Assignment, with Chao Fu, Jesse Gregory, and Victoria Prowse
Abstract: We estimate effects of roommates, neighbors, and dorms on academic outcomes at a large public four-year university. To address selection, we instrument for realized room assignments with simulated offers generated by a room assignment mechanism, while controlling for expected offers implied by the same mechanism. Our candidate assignment mechanisms fail to perfectly replicate the assignment offers made by the central planner, so we select the mechanism that best replicates assignments via a data-driven model selection procedure. We find that living in a fully gender-integrated dorm increases 4-year graduation by 10 percentage points for men, with no significant effects on women, while finding consistent (statistically insignificant) results for exposure to female neighbors within dorms. At the roommate level, we find that STEM roommates have significantly smaller negative effects on four-year graduation for other STEM students than they do for non-STEM students. Our findings suggest that universities with 70% gender-integrated housing (such as the university we study) could increase their male 4-year graduation rates by 3 percentage points by implementing full gender-integration in all dorms, with no offsetting negative effects on women.
Abstract: Many treatment variables used in empirical applications nest multiple unobserved versions of a treatment. I show that instrumental variable (IV) estimands for the effect of a composite treatment are IV-specific weighted averages of effects of unobserved component treatments. Differences between IVs in unobserved component compliance produce differences in IV estimands even without treatment effect heterogeneity. I describe a monotonicity condition under which IV estimands are positively-weighted averages of unobserved component treatment effects. Next, I develop a method that allows instruments that violate monotonicity to contribute to estimation of treatment effects by allowing them to place nonconvex, outcome-invariant weights on unobserved treatments across multiple outcomes. Finally, I apply the method to estimate returns to college, finding wage returns that range from 7% to 30% over the life cycle. My findings emphasize the importance of leveraging instrumental variables that do not shift individuals between versions of treatment, as well as the importance of policies that encourage students to attend “high-return college” in addition to those that encourage “high-return students” to attend college.
The Effects of Chicago’s Teacher Walkouts on Juvenile Crime, with Abigail Banan, Mary Kate Batistich, Jillian Carr, and Kendall Kennedy
Abstract: On September 10, 2012, Chicago’s teachers began a strike that forced over 400,000 students out of school for 8 consecutive school days. This study examines how this interruption in schooling affected crime in Chicago, both during and immediately after the strike. Using a variety of methods – interrupted time series analysis, synthetic controls, and place-based intensity of treatment analysis – we find that crime rates in Chicago neither significantly nor substantially changed after the strike, suggesting incapacitation has little role in the effect of education on crime.
The Effects of Peer Diversity on Entrepreneurship: Evidence from University Residence Halls, with Jon Eckhardt and Brent Goldfarb
Abstract: We estimate the effects of peer academic diversity and peer gender diversity within college dorms on student entrepreneurship at a large public research university over a period of 4 years. To obtain causal estimates, we instrument for realized peer traits with simulated peer traits determined by the peers students would have been assigned had they been assigned to rooms by a room allocation mechanism that we select, while controlling for the expected peer traits implied by the same mechanism. We find that exposure to peer gender diversity differentially affects men and women and contributes to the gender gap in entrepreneurial intentions. We also find that exposure to peer verbal skill diversity reduces entrepreneurial ideation. Our findings suggest that residentially clustering students by gender and academic strengths can increase student entrepreneurship and reduce the entrepreneurship gender gap.
A Survey Selection Correction using Nonrandom Followup with an Application to the Gender Entrepreneurship Gap, with Jon Eckhardt and Brent Goldfarb
Abstract: Selection into samples undermines efforts to describe populations and to estimate relationships between variables. We develop a simple method for correcting for sample selection that explains differences in survey responses between early and late respondents with correlation between potential responses and preference for survey response. Our method relies on researchers observing the number of data collection attempts prior to each individual’s survey response rather than covariates that affect response rates without affecting potential responses. Applying our method to a survey of entrepreneurial aspirations among undergraduates at University of Wisconsin-Madison, we find suggestive evidence that the entrepreneurial aspiration rate is larger among survey respondents than the population, as well as the male-female gender gap in the entrepreneurial aspiration rate, which we estimate as 21 percentage points in the sample and 19 percentage points in the population. Our results suggest that the male-female gap in entrepreneurial aspirations arises prior to direct exposure to the labor market.
Works in Progress:
Separate Identification and Estimation of Perceived Credit Constraints and Perceived Returns to College Using Observed Attendance Decisions
Looking out for Number 1,2,...,T: Decomposing Discounting into Identity Persistence and Altruism