Research
Working Papers
Effects of Test-Optional Admissions on Underrepresented Minority Enrollment and Graduation [Job Market Paper]
Abstract: A growing number of colleges and universities have made the submission of college entrance exam scores optional for undergraduate admissions to bolster racial diversity. This study uses a panel of liberal arts colleges from IPEDS and applies a two-way fixed effects approach to determine whether the policy is effective at achieving this goal. It also estimates the impact of the policy on the graduation rates for underrepresented minority (URM) students. It finds that the policy bolsters freshman URM enrollment among test-optional institutions throughout the sample as a whole, regardless of admissions selectivity and early versus late treatment timing. The effects of this policy on the URM 4-year and 6-year graduation rates are heterogeneous across colleges by their selectivity in admissions. While the most selective colleges in the panel experience no change in URM graduation rates, less-selective colleges experience declines in these graduation rates.
When Is Discrimination Unfair? (with Peter Kuhn)
Abstract: Using a vignette-based survey experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we measure how people’s assessments of the fairness of race-based hiring decisions vary with the motivation and circumstances surrounding the discriminatory act and the races of the parties involved. Regardless of their political leaning, our subjects react in very similar ways to the employer’s motivations for the action, such as the quality of information on which statistical discrimination is based. Compared to conservatives, moderates and liberals are much less accepting of discriminatory actions, and consider the discriminatee’s race when making their fairness assessments. We describe four pre-registered models of fairness – (simple) utilitarianism, race-blind rules (RBRs), racial in-group bias, and belief-based utilitarianism (BBU) – and show that the latter two are inconsistent with major aggregate patterns in our data. Instead, we argue that a two-group framework, in which one group (mostly self-described conservatives) values employers’ decision rights and the remaining respondents value utilitarian concerns, explains our main findings well. In this model, both groups also value applying a consistent set of fairness rules in a race-blind manner.
In progress
The Perks of Perkins Loans