In Progress
How Academic Standards Shape the Returns to For-Profit and Public Colleges
Where Does the Tide Roll? The Causes and Consequences of Out-of-State Enrollment at Public Flagships (with Crossan Cooper)
Working Papers
Can Public Colleges Cater to For-Profit Students?
Abstract: For-profit colleges yield lower returns than public alternatives but may attract students who would otherwise forgo higher education. I estimate for-profit students’ second choices from their revealed preferences following abrupt for-profit chain closures. Between 30-50% of for-profit students substitute to public colleges, yet those who do downshift to part-time enrollment, slowing their degree progression. Public diversion is significantly larger where for-profit and public colleges specialize in similar programs. New public programs introduced under a large community-college grant program sap for-profit enrollment only when their fields of study overlap, reinforcing the evidence that limited substitution stems from for-profits’ distinctive vocational programs.
Quality Regulation Creates and Reallocates Trade (with Lucas Zavala, Ana Fernandes, Tristan Reed, & Jose-Daniel Reyes)
Abstract: Quality regulation has become the dominant instrument of trade policy. Panel evidence shows that regulations classified as sanitary and phytosanitary measures and technical barriers to trade both increase trade on average. Other non-tariff measures like quotas decrease trade. Sanitary and phytosanitary measures reallocate trade from lower-income exporting countries to higher-income exporting countries, while technical barriers to trade measures do the opposite. Sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade measures increase the sales concentration of exporting firms from lower-income countries, but do not affect the concentration of exporting firms from higher-income countries or importing firms. The costs of quality regulation are primarily borne by exporting firms, especially in lower-income countries.
Publications
Employment effects of unemployment insurance generosity during the pandemic (July 2020, with Altonji et al.)
Abstract: The CARES Act expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits by providing a $600 weekly payment in addition to state unemployment benefits. Most workers thus became eligible to receive unemployment benefits that exceed their weekly wages. It has been hypothesized that such high benefits encourage employers to lay off workers and discourage workers from returning to work. In this note, we test whether changes in UI benefit generosity are associated with decreased employment, both at the onset of the benefits expansion and as businesses look to reopen. We use weekly data from Homebase, a private firm that provides scheduling and time clock software to small businesses, which allows us to exploit high-frequency changes in state and federal policies to understand how firms and workers respond to policy changes in real time. Additionally, we benchmark our results from the Homebase data to employment outcomes in the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that that the workers who experienced larger increases in UI generosity did not experience larger declines in employment when the benefits expansion went into effect. Additionally, we find that workers facing larger expansions in UI benefits have returned to their previous jobs over time at similar rates as others. We find no evidence that more generous benefits disincentivized work either at the onset of the expansion or as firms looked to return to business over time. In future research, it will be important to assess whether the same results hold when states move to reopen, and to analyze the effects of high UI replacement rates on reallocation of labor both within and across firms.