By Juliana Londoño-Vélez, Catherine Rodríguez and Fabio Sánchez
How does financial aid affect postsecondary enrollment, college choice, and student composition? We present new evidence based on a large-scale program available to high-achieving, low-income students for attending high-quality colleges in Colombia. RD estimates show financial aid eligibility raised immediate enrollment by 56.5 to 86.5 percent, depending on the complier population. This rise, driven by matriculation at private, high-quality colleges, closed the SES enrollment gap among high achievers. Moreover, a DID approach suggests enrollment of aid-ineligible students also improved because college supply expanded in response to heightened demand. With ability stratification largely replacing SES stratification, diversity increased 46 percent at private, high-quality colleges.
Using data from six urban school districts, we examine the relationship between the quality of interactions in the classroom (measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System [CLASS] framework) and the racial match or mismatch between teachers and the students in their classes. We find that White teachers have lower scores on the CLASS framework when they teach classes with higher densities of Black students. Furthermore, in classrooms with high densities of Black students, Black teachers receive higher scores than White teachers. This finding has important implications given the demographics of our nation’s public schools and the underrepresentation of Black teachers.
By Ariel Burstein, Eduardo Morales and Jonathan Vogel
We provide a unifying framework to quantify the impact of several determinants of changes in US between-group inequality. We use an assignment framework with many labor groups, equipment types, and occupations in which changes in inequality are driven by changes in workforce composition, occupation demand, computerization, and labor productivity. We parameterize the model using direct measures of computer usage within labor group-occupation pairs and quantify the impact of each shock for various dimensions of between-group inequality between 1984 and 2003. We find, for example, that computerization and shifts in occupation demand jointly account for roughly 80 percent of the rise in the skill premium, with computerization alone accounting for roughly 60 percent. In an open-economy extension of the model, we show how computerization and changes in occupation demand can be caused by changes in the extent of international trade and perform counterfactual exercises to quantify these effects.
By Till von Wachter, Jae Song, David J Price, Fatih Guvenen and Nicholas Bloom
We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred due to a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves but by a widening gap between firms in the composition of their workers. This compositional change can be split into two roughly equal parts: high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work in high-wage firms (i.e., sorting increased), and high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work with each other (i.e., segregation rose). In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for the worker composition in firms. Finally, we find that two-thirds of the rise in the within-firm variance of earnings occurred within mega (10,000+ employee) firms, which saw a particularly large increase in the variance of earnings compared with smaller firms.
In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the women appointed to these boards post-reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. However, we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota. Moreover, the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. Finally, we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women. While the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, we do see some improvements in labor market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages; however, we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees, suggesting this may not be due to the reform. Overall, seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect, we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms.
This paper empirically investigates how sentences to be assigned at trial impact plea bargaining. The analysis is based on the model of bargaining with asymmetric information by Bebchuk, 1984. I provide conditions for the nonparametric identification of the model, propose a consistent nonparametric estimator, and implement it using data on criminal cases from North Carolina. Employing the estimated model, I evaluate how different sentencing reforms affect the outcome of criminal cases. My results indicate that lower mandatory minimum sentences could greatly reduce the total amount of incarceration time assigned by the courts, but may increase conviction rates. In contrast, the broader use of non‐incarceration sentences for less serious crimes reduces the number of incarceration convictions, but has a very small effect over the total assigned incarceration time. I also consider the effects of a ban on plea bargains. Depending on the case characteristics, over 20 percent of the defendants who currently receive incarceration sentences would be acquitted if plea bargains were forbidden.
The labor force participation rates of women have risen dramatically over the past several decades. Much has been made of the increase in the numbers of women with young children who are now participating in the labor market despite the demands on their time at home. At older ages, women face similar competing demands on their time in the form of care for elderly family members. Due to increasing life expectancy, women who are now in their 50s and early 60s are more likely than ever to have a living parent and are thus more likely to be at risk of needing to provide care. In this chapter, we analyze the prevalence of the provision of long-term care for a representative sample of women in their pre-retirement years and look to see how this caregiving affects employment. We find a significant positive trend across cohorts in the need to provide care and a significant effect of caregiving on work, with caregiving reducing the probability of work by just over 8 percent and the number of hours worked by 4 percent. Our cohort analysis points to a growing impact of caregiving over time and suggests that the lack of affordable long-term care options can have a substantial impact on employment rates.
This paper uses the rollout of the first Community Health Centers (CHCs) to study the longer-term health effects of increasing access to primary care. Within ten years, CHCs are associated with a reduction in age-adjusted mortality rates of 2 percent among those 50 and older. The implied 7 to 13 percent decrease in one-year mortality risk among beneficiaries amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the 1966 poor/non-poor mortality gap for this age group. Large effects for those 65 and older suggest that increased access to primary care has longer-term benefits, even for populations with near universal health insurance.
Upstream and Downstream Impacts of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students: Ser Pilo Paga in Colombia
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Juliana Londoño-Vélez, Catherine Rodríguez and Fabio Sánchez
Quality of Classroom Interactions and the Demographic Divide: Evidence From the Measures of Effective Teaching Study
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Olivia Osei-Twumasi and Bernardette J. Pinetta
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Changes in between-group Inequality: Computers, Occupations, and International Trade
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Ariel Burstein, Eduardo Morales and Jonathan Vogel
We provide a unifying framework to quantify the impact of several determinants of changes in US between-group inequality. We use an assignment framework with many labor groups, equipment types, and occupations in which changes in inequality are driven by changes in workforce composition, occupation demand, computerization, and labor productivity. We parameterize the model using direct measures of computer usage within labor group-occupation pairs and quantify the impact of each shock for various dimensions of between-group inequality between 1984 and 2003. We find, for example, that computerization and shifts in occupation demand jointly account for roughly 80 percent of the rise in the skill premium, with computerization alone accounting for roughly 60 percent. In an open-economy extension of the model, we show how computerization and changes in occupation demand can be caused by changes in the extent of international trade and perform counterfactual exercises to quantify these effects.
Read full paper here
Firming Up Inequality
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Till von Wachter, Jae Song, David J Price, Fatih Guvenen and Nicholas Bloom
We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred due to a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves but by a widening gap between firms in the composition of their workers. This compositional change can be split into two roughly equal parts: high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work in high-wage firms (i.e., sorting increased), and high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work with each other (i.e., segregation rose). In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for the worker composition in firms. Finally, we find that two-thirds of the rise in the within-firm variance of earnings occurred within mega (10,000+ employee) firms, which saw a particularly large increase in the variance of earnings compared with smaller firms.
Read full paper here
Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Adriana lleras-Muney
In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the women appointed to these boards post-reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. However, we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota. Moreover, the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. Finally, we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women. While the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, we do see some improvements in labor market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages; however, we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees, suggesting this may not be due to the reform. Overall, seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect, we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms.
Read full paper here
Bargaining with Asymmetric Information: An Empirical Study of Plea Negotiations
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Bernardo S. Silveira
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Women Working Longer: Labor Market Implications of Providing Family Care
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Kathleen McGarry and Sean Fahle
The War on Poverty’s Experiment in Public Medicine: The Impact of Community Health Centers on the Mortality of Older Americans
/in EDI /by Stephanie FergusonBy Martha Bailey and Andrew Goodman-Bacon
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