Using UCAS MEM in Contextual Offers (with Stephanie Jong and Myles Smith) Higher Education Quarterly, Vol. 79 (1), January 2025
Contextual admissions schemes are commonly used across the United Kingdom (UK) for admission into higher education (HE) institutions. These schemes consider an applicant's background and circumstances alongside academic achievement to provide a fairer evaluation of progression into university. Several contextual factors have been considered by HE providers and few have been evaluated in the literature. However, the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) Multiple Equality Measure (MEM), introduced in 2018, is yet to be evaluated in contextual admissions schemes. This study evaluates the use of UCAS MEM data for contextual admissions at one mid-sized UK institution using a difference-in-differences framework and institutional data on applications for academic years 2021/22 and 2022/23. We found that the introduction of contextual offers, using UCAS MEM data, reduced the likelihood that applicants declined their offer. Applicants were more likely to place the offer from the university as their insurance option. This suggests that the contextual offer increased the appeal of the institution as a solid insurance option, with a marginal increase in probability of study at the institution. Caution is needed when implementing a contextual admissions policy based on UCAS MEM. University policies should consider alignment with their Access and Participation Plan (APP) objectives and commitments, and to ensure applicants understand the basis on which they may be offered a contextual offer.
Inequality in an Equal Society (Joint with Jochen O. Mierau and James Rockey) Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 86 (4): 871-904, August 2024
A society in which everybody of a given age has the same income will exhibit substantial income and wealth inequality. We use this idea to empirically quantify inter-cohort inequality - the share of observed inequality attributable to life-cycle profiles of income and wealth - using data on male earnings and household wealth. We document that recent increases in income and wealth inequality in the United States and other developed countries are larger than observed rates would suggest due to favourable demographics. That is, while demographic change played a substantial role in the dynamics of income and wealth inequality until 1990, the stark increase in inequality in the US and elsewhere ever since is despite not because of demographic change
Short version of the paper included in:
Going back to the high schools: Challenging Stereotypes about economics (with Arun Advani and Sarah Smith) (AEARCTR-0010148) submitted
[CEPR Discussion Paper DP20483]
Stereotyped beliefs about subjects may distort subject choices – for example, the perception that economics is (only) about money may deter some students. We report on a UK-wide program of taster sessions that increased high-school students’ interest in studying economics. The sessions broadened students’ perception of economics: This accounted for 20 per cent of the increased interest. The sessions also changed students’ beliefs about studying economics. Particularly important were students’ increased beliefs that they would do well in economics and that they would enjoy it. Better information may reduce mismatch, particularly for students studying subjects for the first time.
Long-Run Stagnation in US Real Wages: An Unconditional Quantile Approach (with James Rockey) Revise & Resubmit
This paper examines long-run stagnation in real wages and lifetime earnings in the United States, contrasting the experiences the Silent Generation (1925-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1979), and Millennials (1980-1999). Despite significant economic growth, we find persistent stagnation or decline in real wages across generations, with younger cohorts earning less than their predecessors over the lifecycle. Using data from the CPS and employing unconditional quantile regression, we reveal heterogeneous effects across the earnings distribution. Overall, earnings declines are concentrated in the middle of the distribution with increases at the top and the bottom. Declines are particularly large for Millennials. However, this trend masks differences by gender. These declines are driven by falling incomes of men, which outweigh the increases observed for women over the period. We find declines in men's wages at nearly every quantile for post-Silent generations, with the decline greater in lower quantiles. Increases in women's real wages have stalled-while Boomers earn more than their Silent Generation equivalents, Millennial women do not earn more than Baby Boomers. We find a similar pattern across races and education levels.
Wealth, Quits and Layoffs (with Alex Clymo & Piotr Denderski)
Using worker-level panel data we document that current wealth predicts the probability that a worker transitions from employment to non-employment. We find a surprising U-shaped pattern: Low-wealth workers face higher probability than the median worker, but so do the high-wealth workers. This result is robust to a battery of controls and suggests that wealth feeds back into the income process, creating a novel interaction between wealth and income inequalities. We extend the standard incomplete markets model `a la Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett to include search frictions and jobs with heterogeneous unemployment risk and show that it can replicate our findings because i) low wealth workers optimally accept higher risk jobs in order to leave unemployment faster, and ii) high wealth workers voluntarily quit to enjoy more leisure. Accounting for the non-trivial interactions between wealth and non-employment matters for the quantification of the precautionary savings motive, wealth distribution, and wealth mobility.
Differential Effects of Parents Income on the Wages of Sons and Daughters
There is a substantial body of literature which tries to estimate trends in intergenerational mobility. However, it fails to appropriately take into consideration non-random selection into employment, which is especially critical in the female labour market. As a consequence, the literature has omitted an important analysis in the trends in mobility of daughters. This paper reconciles these issues with partial identification methods to apply bounds to the distribution of earnings conditional on parent income. We use the labour market attachment of the mother as a novel IV to tighten the bounds the distribution of earnings. We find that there are substantial differences between parent income groups and changes over time by sons and daughters. We find college to be important for all groups, but particularly for daughters. In addition, evidence of converging wages between sons and daughters for all parent income types.
Understanding the Effectiveness of University Access Agreements
Global (Local) Inequality and Promotion Contests (with Sebastian Cortes Corrales)