Jack Mountjoy
Assistant Professor of Economics and Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Primary Research Fields
Curriculum Vitae
Contact
Assistant Professor of Economics and Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Primary Research Fields
- Labor Economics
- Applied Econometrics
- Economics of Education
Curriculum Vitae
Contact
PublicationsReview of Economic Studies, forthcoming (with Ivan Canay and Magne Mogstad)Abstract: The decisions of judges, lenders, journal editors, and other gatekeepers often lead to significant disparities across affected groups. An important question is whether, and to what extent, these group-level disparities are driven by relevant differences in underlying individual characteristics, or by biased decision makers. Becker (1957,1993) proposed an outcome test of bias based on differences in post-decision outcomes across groups, inspiring a large and growing empirical literature. The goal of our paper is to offer a methodological blueprint for empirical work that seeks to use outcome tests to detect bias. We show that models of decision making underpinning outcome tests can be usefully recast as Roy models, since heterogeneous potential outcomes enter directly into the decision maker’s choice equation. Different members of the Roy model family, however, are distinguished by the tightness of the link between potential outcomes and decisions. We show that these distinctions have important implications for defining bias, deriving logically valid outcome tests of such bias, and identifying the marginal outcomes that the test requires.
American Economic Review, 112(8), August 2022Abstract: Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of 2-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value-added for 2-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate 4-year entry.
Working Papers
Work in Progress
American Economic Review, 112(8), August 2022Abstract: Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of 2-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value-added for 2-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate 4-year entry.
- Improving Educational Pathways to Social Mobility: Evidence from Norway's Reform 94 (preprint) (appendix)
Working Papers
- Marginal Returns to Public Universities (presenting; draft coming soon)
- The Returns to College(s): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education (with Brent Hickman) (NBER) (BFI)
Work in Progress
- Long-Run Impacts of Charter School Attendance (with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak)
- Private Scholarships: Improving Access and Impact (with Joshua Angrist, Raymond Han, Maggie Liu, and Andrew Whitten)
- Pay vs. Productivity (with Magne Mogstad and Gaute Torsvik)