62 research outputs found
Replication data for: Teacher Expectations Matter
No full textPapageorge, Nicholas W., Gershenson, Seth, and Kang, Kyung Min, (2020) “Teacher Expectations Matter.” Review of Economics and Statistics 102:2, 234–251
Replication data for: Teacher Expectations Matter
No full textPapageorge, Nicholas W., Gershenson, Seth, and Kang, Kyung Min, (2020) “Teacher Expectations Matter.” Review of Economics and Statistics 102:2, 234–251
Replication data for: Teacher Expectations Matter
No full textPapageorge, Nicholas W., Gershenson, Seth, and Kang, Kyung Min, (2020) “Teacher Expectations Matter.” Review of Economics and Statistics 102:2, 234–251
Nicholas Evrotas and son
No full textNicholas Evrotas and son, June 23, 1921. Courtesy of Calomira Papageorge Canari
Nicholas Evrotas and son
No full textNicholas Evrotas and son, June 23, 1921. Courtesy of Calomira Papageorge Canari
Reverend Thomas Papageorge's family
No full textThe family of Reverend Thomas Papageorge, Pastor at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church who lived in Newark from 1913-1919 (l-r) Evripides, George, Presbytera Mary, baby Demetrios, Evangeline and Rev. Papageorge, c. 1913. Courtesy of Calomira Papageorge Canari
We should totally open a restaurant: How optimism and overconfidence affects beliefs
No full textWishful thinking, defined as the tendency to over-estimate the probability of high-payoff outcomes, is a widely-documented phenomenon that can affect decision-making across numerous domains, including finance, management, and entrepreneurship. We design an experiment to distinguish and test the relationship between two easily-confounded biases, optimism and overconfidence, both of which can contribute to wishful thinking. We find that optimism and overconfidence are positively correlated at the individual level and that both help to explain wishful thinking. These findings suggest that ignoring optimism results in an upwardly biased estimate of the role of overconfidence in explaining wishful thinking. To illustrate this point, we show that 30% of our observations are misclassified as under- or overconfident if optimism is omitted from the analysis. Our findings have potential implications for the design of information interventions since how agents incorporate information depends on whether the bias is ego-related
Non-Cognitive Skills and Self Employment
No full textRecent work has connected non-cognitive skills and personality traits to self employment. This type of research is motivated by the possibility of linking successful entrepreneurship to a set of measurable and fairly modifiable factors. The proposed research will add to this literature. My key departure from earlier work is that I will consider two skills that are measured during childhood and that capture maladjustment and misbehavior. My focus on these skills is motivated by recent findings in Papageorge, Ronda, and Zheng (2014). In that paper, the authors document how one of the two skills in question, known as externalizing behavior (and linked to aggression), though it lowers schooling attainment and raises the likelihood of being arrested during adulthood, has a positive impact on earnings and also predicts entry into self employment. These patterns not only raise the possibility of identifying entrepreneurs at very young ages. They also suggest that a factor that drives entrepreneurship is penalized in school
Birth certificate of Maria Spirido
No full textCertificate of Birth and Baptism of Maria Spiridoulias from the Greek Archdiocese of North and South America. Maria was baptized at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, Newark, N.J. by the Reverend Thomas Papageorge, c. 1912. Courtesy of Calomira Papageorge Canari
ESSAYS ON HIGHER EDUCATION AND HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENTS
No full textThis dissertation explores individual's investment in human capital and how that interacts with public policy interventions. I focus on investment in human capital in the form of college education. First, I note the importance of distinguishing college enrollment and college completion when studying human capital investment during adolescence. I then study how teachers could affect individuals' educational outcomes. I then study the determinants of students' college choices.
In the first chapter, ``Parental Income, College Enrollment and College Completoin'', I explore the effect of parental income on college matriculation and college completion.
I provide novel evidence that, despite little effect on college enrollment rates, transitory parental income when a child is between the ages of 16 and 18 has a substantial impact on college completion rates. To rationalize this pattern, I develop and estimate a model of sequential parental investments in their children's college education. The model incorporates parents' uncertainty over (1) their own future income and (2) the likelihood their child will complete college. Parents facing uncertainty may choose to enroll their child in college, but do not necessarily fund their children's college through degree completion. Parents may also send their children to higher-quality schools that charge higher tuition, but have lower dropout rates. The estimated model reveals that higher-income parents facing uncertainty are more likely to help finance college attendance and to send their children to colleges with higher completion rates, which helps to explain why higher income affects completion but not enrollment. Moreover, using the estimated model, I show that counterfactual policies that reduce uncertainty can increase college completion rates.
In the second chapter, ``Teacher Expectations Matter'', which is joint work with Nicholas Papageorge and Seth Gershenson, we show that 10th-grade teacher expectations affect students' likelihood of college completion. Our approach leverages a unique feature of a nationally representative dataset: two teachers provided their educational expectations for each student. Identification exploits teacher disagreements about the same student, an idea we formalize using a measurement error model. We estimate an elasticity of college completion with respect to teachers' expectations of 0.12. On average, teachers are overly-optimistic, though white teachers are less so with black students. More accurate beliefs are counterproductive if there are returns to optimism or if there are socio-demographic gaps in optimism; we find evidence of both.
In the third chapter, ``Why Not Choose the Best School? The Determinants of College Choices'', I study the determinants of college choices among the schools offering admission. There is extensive research literature on the determinants of mismatch between student ability and college quality that focuses mostly on how students make application decisions. However, the college decision process consists of several stages and includes students' decision-making processes when deciding on which school's admissions offer to accept. This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults data to examine how students' choose colleges among the schools offering admission. The analysis shows that while most students choose schools with the highest quality among the available offers, about 40\% of students do not. Student's demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds do not explain such enrollment pattern well. College characteristics in relation to student's characteristics---the degree of overmatch (low ability students at high quality colleges) and the distance to college---affect college choice
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