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The Effects of the Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship on College Enrollment and Completion
No full textWe estimate the effects on postsecondary education outcomes of the Kalamazoo Promise, a generous, place-based college scholarship. We identify Promise effects using two forms of difference-in-differences: (i) comparing eligible to ineligible graduates before and after the Promise’s initiation and (ii) comparing the treated district to comparison districts before and after the Promise’s initiation. According to our estimates, the Promise increases college enrollment and credential attainment. Stronger effects occur for women. The results also provide suggestive but less precise evidence that Promise effects extend to disadvantaged groups
How Does the Elimination of State Aid to For-Profit Colleges Affect Enrollment? Evidence from California’s Reforms
Get PDFThis paper examines how financial aid reform based on postsecondary institutional performance impacts student choice. Federal and state regulations often reflect concerns about the private, for-profit sector’s poor employment outcomes and high loan defaults, despite the sector’s possible theoretical advantages. We use student-level data to examine how eliminating public subsidies to attend low-performing for-profit institutions impacts students’ college enrollment and completion behavior. Beginning in 2011, California tightened eligibility standards for their state aid program, effectively eliminating most for-profit eligibility. Linking data on aid application to administrative payment and postsecondary enrollment records, this paper utilizes a difference-in differences strategy to investigate students’ enrollment and degree completion responses to changes in subsidies. We find that restricting the use of the Cal Grant at for-profit institutions resulted in significant state savings but led to relatively small changes in students’ postsecondary trajectories. For older, nontraditional students we find no impact on enrollment or degree completion outcomes. Similarly, for high school graduates, we find that for-profit enrollment remains strong. Unlike the older, nontraditional students, however, there is some evidence of declines in for-profit degree completion and increased enrollment at community colleges among the high school graduates, but these results are fairly small and sensitive to empirical specification. Overall, our results suggest that both traditional and nontraditional students have relatively inelastic preferences for for-profit colleges under aid-restricting policies
Equity in Unemployment Insurance Benefit Access
Get PDFThis paper examines the uneven pattern of access to unemployment insurance (UI) by age, gender, and race across the United States. We present results from a descriptive analysis using publicly available longitudinal data reported by states on rates of UI recipiency and characteristics of UI beneficiaries. Recipiency measures the proportion of all unemployed who are receiving UI benefits. UI is intended to provide temporary, partial income replacement to involuntarily unemployed UI applicants with strong labor force attachments while they are able, available, and actively seeking return to work. Each of these UI eligibility conditions contributes to the UI recipiency rate being less than 100 percent, and the individual decision to apply for benefits also affects the recipiency rate. We examine each of these factors and find suggestive evidence of reasons for differences in recipiency by age, gender, and race. We discuss practical program reforms to improve equity in access to UI that could be adopted by all states and required by the federal government
Isolated States of America: The Impact of State Borders on Mobility and Regional Labor Market Adjustments
Get PDFI document a new empirical pattern of internal mobility in the United States. Namely, county-to-county migration and commuting drop off discretely at state borders. People are three times as likely to move to a county 15 miles away, but in the same state, than to move to an equally distant county in a different state. These gaps remain even among neighboring counties or counties in the same commuting zone. This pattern is not explained by differences in county characteristics, is not driven by any particular demographic group, and is not explained by pecuniary costs such as differences in state occupational licensing, taxes, or transfer program generosity. However, county-to-county social connectedness (as measured by the number of Facebook linkages) follows a similar pattern. Although the patterns in social networks would be consistent with information frictions, nonpecuniary psychic costs, or behavioral biases such as a sate identity or home bias, the data suggest that state identity and home bias play an outsized role. This empirical pattern has real economic impacts. Building on existing methods, I show that employment in border counties adjusts more slowly after local economic shocks relative to interior counties. These counties also exhibit less in-migration and in-commuting, suggesting the lack of mobility leads to slower labor market adjustment
Construction of Broadband in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan: Estimates of Economic Impacts
Get PDFThe Merit Network, in support of a U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) grant application, asked the Regional and Economic Planning Services Team at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research (Upjohn) to estimate the economic impact of building and maintaining more than 70 miles of broadband infrastructure in the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The region for estimating economic impacts is referred to as the eastern Upper Peninsula (EUP) and the region includes Luce, Chippewa, and Mackinac counties. The estimates for constructing the broadband infrastructure are reported for the period 2021 to 2023 and include labor as well as hard and soft costs.
While the study contains estimated impacts to the study region as well as to the rest of the state of Michigan and the rest of the United States, it focuses only on the construction and maintenance of the broadband and not the benefits of the “last mile” to firms operating such systems, or to businesses or residents using such systems.
The study finds that the combined impact for all regions – the EUP, the rest of Michigan, and the rest of the United States – for the 2021 to 2023 period is slightly more than 10.4 million, and the estimated impact in personal income for all regions is $4.9 million
Was the “Arsenal of Democracy” an Engine of Mobility?
No full textIn the middle of the 20th-century, places with more manufacturing jobs had higher rates of upward mobility. This project examines how regions with high-wage manufacturing employment opportunities causally impact economic mobility by studying the construction of larger, government-funded manufacturing plants during World War II in locations in which private firms would not invest. We find that plant sitings during World War II significantly expanded high-wage manufacturing employment throughout the postwar decades. In our ongoing work, we use novel longitudinally linked data sources to study how plant sitings impacted the adult earnings of individuals who lived nearby prior to the War as children. Early results show that plant sitings causally increased rates of upward mobility. Our proposed work will use data on the demographics and adult employers to assess whether opportunities to work in high-paying manufacturing plants directly account for the increases in earnings we find in our work to date, or whether increases in human capital acquisition boost adult earnings regardless of the sector of employment. These proposed analyses will enable us to relate these findings to modern place-based policy proposals
Differences in On-the-Job Learning Across Firms
No full textWe examine whether experience accumulated in firms offering different learning opportunities affects early career wage growth. We take advantage of matched employee-employer data sets from Brazil and Italy. We discretize firm “classes” using a clustering methodology which groups together firms with similar distributions of unexplained wage growth. We introduce a conceptual framework which posits that different firm classes encompass firms offering heterogeneous learning opportunities. Preliminary results indicate that the Mincerian returns to experience vary substantially across experience acquired in different firm classes, and the magnitude of this type of heterogeneity is associated with significant shifts across the distribution of early-career wage growth. Second, past experience at firms with better on-the-job learning is associated with subsequent jobs featuring greater non-routine task content. Our findings hold among involuntarily displaced workers who have no seniority at their new jobs, reinforcing a human capital interpretation as opposed to seniority-based pay schemes. We lastly train a machine learning algorithm to examine the characteristics of firms with strong learning opportunities
Can Academic Coaching Improve Marginal College Students\u27 Academic and Labor Market Outcomes?
No full textIn this project, we evaluate an academic coaching program aimed at improving lower-performing college students’ academic performance. To establish a causal link between mentoring and students’ future outcomes, we leverage a unique aspect of the mentoring program at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo. This program effectively randomized students into mentoring groups based on first quarter GPA enabling us to investigate whether coaching impacted students’ attrition, graduation and labor market outcomes. Importantly, we make two unique contributions in this project. We are one of the very few papers to focus on the causal link between college mentoring and labor market outcomes. Indeed, we are currently in the process of acquiring and matching California unemployment insurance records to our student level data enabling us to track the labor market outcomes of all students affected (and unaffected) by the program. Additionally, the coaching program we study specifically targets lower-performing students. As a result, findings from this project may help provide practitioners and policymakers with an effective blueprint for the design of mentoring programs aimed at enhancing lower-performing college students’ success and integration into the labor market. It also serves to add to our understanding of the college interventions that work best for less-prepared students