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Grads on the Go: Measuring College-Specific Labor Markets for Graduates
Get PDFThis paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of “brain drain” across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education
Essays in Public and Labor Economics
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I study how public policies and economic shocks impact workers, employers, and the structure of the labor market, aiming to inform optimal policy design and reduce existing inequalities. Chapter 1 studies the optimal design of unemployment insurance financing policies, comparing two approaches to assign unemployment tax rates to employers: assigning individualized rates in proportion to the benefit spending resulting from employers’ layoffs (experience rating) and assigning the same tax rate to all the employers (coinsurance). I derive a sufficient-statistics formula defining the optimal degree of experience rating through a tradeoff between the marginal benefits and costs of coinsurance. Then, I estimate with quasi-experiments or calibrate these benefits and costs for Colorado and South Carolina to evaluate the optimality of their policies. I find that the marginal cost of coinsurance exceeded the benefit in South Carolina, suggesting that its degree of experience rating was suboptimal. Consistent with its higher degree of experience rating, I find the opposite for Colorado. Chapter 2 studies whether gender quotas governing municipal elections promote the election of female mayors. The quotas mandate minimum female representation in electoral lists and government bodies, but do not directly target mayoral positions. Their impact on mayoral representation hinges on the existence of spillover effects. I leverage the adoption of three gender quota policies in large Italian municipalities and use event-study and regression discontinuity methods to decompose the aggregate effects of the quotas into mechanical effects, due to compliance, and residual spillover, effects. The quotas increased female representation in lower-level government positions beyond legal requirements but had no impact on mayoral positions. Chapter 3 investigates gender disparities in the labor market effects of COVID-19 for skilled Ugandan workers. Leveraging a high-frequency panel, we find that the Ugandan lockdowns disproportionately reduced female employment, generating a novel employment gender gap which persisted for eighteen months. Additionally, the lockdowns shifted women from wage-employment to self-employment and into unskilled sectors, and widened the gender pay gap. Women’s pre-pandemic sorting into severely hit economic sectors and childcare responsibilities induced by schools’ closure explain up to 65% of the employment gap
Financial Incentives for Adoption and Kin Guardianship Improve Achievement for Foster Children
Get PDFDifference-in-differences analysis of linked administrative data estimates effects of a Minnesota policy change that increased the payments to adoptive parents and kin guardians for children ages 6 and older, making them equal to what foster care payments were, but didn’t for younger children. Equalizing payments raised average academic achievement by 31 percent of a standard deviation three years after foster children’s cases started, raised the value of payments by about $2,000 per child during this period, raised the monthly chance of moving from foster care to adoption or kin guardianship by 29 percent, improved school stability, and reduced school suspensions
