Matching with Stochastic Arrival

By Neil Thakral

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines efficiency and fairness properties in a dynamic allocation problem. The model applies to situations in which objects of different types arrive stochastically over time and must be assigned to agents in a queue, such as the allocation o...

A Reason to Wait: The Effect of Legal Status on Teen Pregnancy

By Elira Kuka, Na'ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Although teen pregnancy has been on the decline in the United States, it remains among the highest within developed countries. Hispanics, who are more likely to be undocumented immigrants, lead this trend, yet the role of legal status has yet to be consid...

A Cautionary Tale about Emergency Financial Assistance without Services: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation at a Community College

By William N. Evans, Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan Perry, and James X. Sullivan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some p...

Attainment Effects of Student Loans and Pell Grants

By Benjamin M. Marx and Lesley J. Turner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We estimate attainment effects of financial aid at a large community college. Using variation from a field experiment that altered how the college presented loans and a discontinuity in the Pell Grant formula, we separately identify the effects of grant a...

Exploring Variation in College Counselor Effectiveness

By Andrew Barr and Ben Castleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Several recent studies have investigated the impact of college advising on whether students enter and succeed in postsecondary education. These papers generally find positive impacts from advising, yet few explore the extent of heterogeneity in impacts be...

The Right to Education Act: Trends in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality

By Manisha Shah and Bryce Steinberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Right to Education (RTE) Act passed in 2009 guarantees access to free primary education to all children ages 6-14 in India. This paper investigates whether national trends in educational outcomes change around the time of this law using household surv...

US Criminal Deportations and Human Capital in Central America

By Maria Micaela Sviatschi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In this paper I ask whether peer effects generate changes in education investments in the areas where deported criminals are located in Central America using administrative data in El Salvador. I exploit the increase in criminal deportations from the Unit...

Intergenerational Human Capital Spillovers: Indonesia's School Construction and Its Effects on the Next Generation

By Bhashkar Mazumder, Maria Rosales-Rueda, and Margaret Triyana

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We analyze the effects of increased access to education in one generation on human capital outcomes in the next generation. Using longitudinal data, we exploit the geographical and cohort variations in exposure to a massive primary school construction pro...

Toward the Next Generation of Scholarship: Challenges and Opportunities for Full Participation in PhD Training in Economics

By Thomas D. Jeitschko

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

A great advantage of our rigorous doctoral training is that as PhD economists we speak a common language that allows for efficient vetting and quick dissemination of ideas and insights. But what good is sophisticated grammar and a powerful vocabulary if t...

The Gender Gap in Undergraduate Economics Course Persistence and Degree Selection

By Laura J. Ahlstrom and Carlos J. Asarta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study examines male and female course persistence and choice of economics degree via a combination of student, instructor, and structural characteristics. We find that students of both genders who declare economics as their major are more likely to t...

Gender Bias and Temporal Effects in Standard Evaluations of Teaching

By Whitney Buser, Jill Hayter, and Emily C. Marshall

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study investigates whether gender differences in SET vary over the course of a semester, particularly in response to feedback from the instructor. We survey principles of economics courses at multiple institutions three times during the semester to a...

Grades in Economics and Other Undergraduate Courses

By William Walstad and William Bosshardt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This study analyzes GPA data from the transcripts of college grades using the Baccalaureate and Beyond survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education. It reports GPAs overall and for 12 undergraduate majors...

Does Environmental Policy Affect Income Inequality? Evidence from the Clean Air Act

By Akshaya Jha, Peter H. Matthews, and Nicholas Z. Muller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper quantifies the impact of environmental policy on income inequality. We focus on the Clean Air act and the National Ambient Air Quality standards for fine particulate matter and ozone. Using a matched difference-in-differences estimator, we find...

Discrimination in Ambient Air Pollution Monitoring?

By Corbett Grainger and Andrew Schreiber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In the United States, ambient air quality is regulated through National Ambient Air Quality standards (NAAQS). Enforcement of these standards is delegated to state and sub-state regulators who are also tasked with designing their own monitoring networks f...

Bringing Satellite-Based Air Quality Estimates Down to Earth

By Meredith Fowlie, Edward Rubin, and Reed Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use state-of-the-art, satellite-based PM 2.5 data products to assess the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency's existing, monitor-based measurements over- or underestimate true exposure to PM 2.5 pollution. Treating satellite-based estim...

Simplified Distributional National Accounts

By Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper develops a simplified methodology to distribute total national income across income groups that reproduces closely the sophisticated methodology of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018). It starts from top income share series based on fiscal income ...

Unequal Distributions: EG DNA versus DINA Approach

By Jorrit Zwijnenburg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In the past years, projects have been initiated to develop distributional results in line with national accounts totals. Their results differ from those obtained from micro statistics, but also show differences across projects, due to different underlying...

Improving the Measure of the Distribution of Personal Income

By Dennis Fixler, Marina Gindelsky, and David Johnson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Developing a national account-based measure of the distribution of income from the commonly used census-based concept of money income has been the subject of earlier research. We use publicly available survey and administrative data to construct a distrib...

Top 1 Percent Income Shares: Comparing Estimates Using Tax Data

By Gerald Auten and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Many studies have used tax data to measure the U.S. income distribution, but their results vary widely. For example, in 2014 the top 1 percent share of income is 21.5 percent in Piketty and Saez (2003 and updates), 16.7 percent in the Congressional Budget...

Fading Stars

By Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study the evolution of superstar firms in the US economy over the past 60 years. Contrary to common wisdom, superstar firms have not become larger or more productive but have become more profitable. The contribution of star firms to aggregate US produc...