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
Do For-Profit Colleges Expand Opportunities in Higher Education? Evidence from Campus Closures
Abstract: For-profit colleges typically yield lower returns than public colleges, but they may expand access to higher education for students who would otherwise forgo college. I evaluate the sources of for-profit demand — whether students are drawn into higher education or away from public options — by tracking enrollment responses to for-profit college closures. Since college exit decisions are endogenous, I focus on the abrupt, nationwide closures of 462 for-profit campuses owned by 11 large chains, identifying enrollment effects from spatial variation in pre-closure market shares. I find that only 25% of for-profit students would substitute to public colleges if for-profits were unavailable, and closures precipitate large declines in total local college enrollment. Turning to mechanisms, I first show that substitution rates are higher in the minority of counties where public and for-profit colleges specialize in similar fields. I then estimate the spillover effects of some 2,700 new public programs introduced under the largest-ever community-college grant program. These programs significantly reduce for-profit enrollment, but only when neighboring for-profits offer overlapping fields. I conclude that for-profits do expand opportunities in higher education, partly due to their distinctive vocation-oriented 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.