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Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

 

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Special Issues and Invited Submissions

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Working Papers

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"Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?"

Revisions Requested at The American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

(with Igor Geyn) [Working Paper]

Abstract: Civic externalities motivate public education spending, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how the United States’ largest tuition-free college program impacted political participation. We find that each of the 2.6 million awards increased a student’s voter turnout rate by 4 to 12 percentage points in 2020, raising total voter turnout by 1 percentage point and Biden’s margin of victory by 0.5 percentage points in the awarding state. We calculate that 1 out of every 66 voters cast a ballot because of the tuition subsidy under conservative assumptions and find evidence consistent with peer socialization, among other mechanisms. The results are externally validated with another RD design using 2.5 million students local to a notch in the generosity of the industrial world’s largest tuition subsidy, the Pell Grant. Our findings demonstrate that the civic externalities of education spending can exceed its labor market returns and are large enough to sway elections.

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"Help Really Wanted? The Impact of Age Stereotypes in Job Ads on Applications from Older Workers"

Revisions Requested at The Journal of Labor Economics

(with Ian Burn, Daniel Ladd, and David Neumark) [NBER Working Paper 30287]

Media Coverage: The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, MarketWatch, Barron's ​

Abstract: Correspondence studies have found evidence of age discrimination in callback rates for older workers, but less is known about whether job advertisements can themselves shape the age composition of the applicant pool. We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard jobs, using language from real job ads collected in a prior large-scale correspondence study (Neumark et al., 2019a). We modify the job-ad language to randomly vary whether or not the job ad includes ageist language regarding age-related stereotypes. Our main analysis relies on machine learning methods to design job ads based on the semantic similarity between phrases in job ads and age-related stereotypes. In contrast to a correspondence study in which job searchers are artificial and researchers study the responses of real employers, in our research the job ads are artificial and we study the responses of real job searchers. We find that job-ad language related to ageist stereotypes, even when the language is not blatantly or specifically age-related, deters older workers from applying for jobs. The change in the age distribution of applicants is large, with significant declines in the average and median age, the 75th percentile of the age distribution, and the share of applicants over 40. Based on these estimates and those from the correspondence study, and the fact that we use real-world ageist job-ad language, we conclude that job-ad language that deters older workers from applying for jobs can have roughly as large an impact on the hiring of older workers as direct age discrimination in hiring.

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"The Effect of Selective Colleges on Student Partisanship"

(Sole Author) [SOCAE 2022 Best Paper Award] [Working Paper]

Media Coverage: The Boston Globe, Marginal Revolution

Abstract: College-educated voters are trending toward the political left across democracies, with the most politically powerful and left-leaning students originating from a smaller number of elite colleges. Using data on over 250,000 University of California applicants and multiple discontinuous admission policies, I estimate the impact of elite colleges on later life partisanship. Admission to highly selective campuses shifts students away from the Republican Party and toward independent or Democratic registration. Administrative data, surveys, and a poll of in-sample students show that on-campus peer socialization and long-run mechanisms like graduate school attendance are plausible, but intentional efforts by faculty to persuade their students are unlikely to explain these results.​​

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"Education Exports and Human Capital Flows: Evidence from a Tuition Waiver Lottery"

(Sole Author)​ [Draft Available Upon Request]

Abstract: Education exports to nonresident students play an important role among policies to strategically relocate skilled workers. Although nonresident supplemental tuition can cross-subsidize the college attendance of local students, it may deter high-skill nonresidents from enrolling and migrating to the host location. This study provides estimates of the longer-run costs of nonresident tuition using a pre-analysis plan and a fee waiver lottery at a major American university. I find that larger tuition waivers increase in-state residency with American citizenship 12 years later, attracting workers with research and executive skills. Every 1,000 dollars in tuition waiver offers cost the university roughly 100 dollars in the short-run, but raises longer-run earnings in the state by over 2,500 dollars, underscoring large asymmetries between short-run college revenue and the social returns to nonresident tuition.​​

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Works in Progress​

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"Partisan Costs of Unfulfilled Student Loan Forgiveness" (with Michael Patrick Span)​

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"From Training to Employment: A Multi-Inquiry Study of Noncredit Workforce Training Programs" (with Di Xu, Benjamin Castleman, Catherine Finnegan, Betsy Tessler, Kelli Bird, and Sabrina Solanki)​

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