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on Education |
| By: | Jacob Wright; Angela Zheng |
| Abstract: | Across all education levels, policymakers are using the re-sorting of students to diversify the socioeconomic composition of student bodies. We study how these integration policies interact, using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model featuring multiple periods of human capital development. Households sort into public schools through housing location, and into college via a competitive admissions process. Quality of schools and colleges are endogenous through peer effects. At the public school level, we simulate an integration policy that randomly shifts students across schools. For college, we consider an income-based affirmative action policy. Public school integration weakens the link between residential location and school quality, increasing intergenerational mobility by 2.5%. On the other hand, the college policy decreases intergenerational mobility by 0.7%: when the high-quality college reserves seats for low-income students, it makes college more competitive, which increases sorting at the public school level. In fact, an integration policy that combines public school re-sorting and college affirmative action leads to minimal changes in upwards mobility. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational mobility; sorting; human capital |
| JEL: | I2 R23 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mcm:deptwp:2024-07 |
| By: | Robert W. Fairlie; Daniel M. Oliver; Glenn Millhauser; Randa Roland |
| Abstract: | An extensive literature in the social sciences analyzes peer effects among students, but estimation is complicated by several major problems some of which cannot be solved even with random assignment. We design a field experiment and propose a new estimation technique to address these estimation problems including the mechanical problems associated with repeated observations within peer groups noted by Angrist (2014). The field experiment randomly assigns students to one-to-one partnerships in an important gateway STEM course at a large public university. We find no evidence of peer effects from estimates of exogenous peer effect models. We push further and estimate outcome-on-outcome models which sometimes reveal peer effects when exogenous models do not provide good proxies for ability. We find some limited evidence of small, positive outcome-on-outcome peer effects (which would have been missed without our new estimation technique). Standard estimation methods fail to detect peer effects and even return negative estimates in our Monte Carlo simulations because of the downward bias due to mechanical problems. Simulations reveal additional advantages of our technique especially when peer group sizes are fixed. Estimates of non-linear effects, heterogeneous effects, and different measures of peer ability and outcomes reveal mostly null effects but we find some evidence that low-ability peers negatively affect low-ability and medium-ability students. The findings in this setting of long-term, intensive interactions with classroom random assignment and “throwing everything at it” provide evidence of, at most, small positive peer effects contrasting with the common finding of large peer effects in previous studies in education. |
| JEL: | I22 I23 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33060 |
| By: | Sadegh S.M. Eshaghnia; James J. Heckman; Rasmus Landersø; Rafeh Qureshi |
| Abstract: | This paper studies intergenerational mobility—the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources motivated by economic theory that account for differences in life-cycle trajectories, and uncertainty about future income. We identify the effects of parents’ resources on child outcomes through policy shocks at different childhood ages that affect family investments. Parents’ expected lifetime resources are stronger predictors of child outcomes than the income measures traditionally used in the literature on social mobility. Moreover, while effects estimated through exogenous variation in parents’ expected lifetime resources are smaller in magnitude than their correlational counterparts, they are still sizable and largest in early childhood. The paper illustrates how integrating key insights from different literatures when studying intergenerational mobility allows for a better understanding of the importance of factors such as the family’s role, changes in individual life cycles across generations, and the expectations and trajectories individuals face across their lifetimes. |
| JEL: | D31 I24 I30 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33023 |
| By: | John Eric Humphries; Christopher Neilson; Xiaoyang Ye; Seth D. Zimmerman |
| Abstract: | This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents' earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents' labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children's academic performance. During children's pre-kindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children's academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar quality but with shorter days. In contrast, parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents' earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents' earnings gains. This return is large compared to other labor market policies. Conversely, excluding earnings gains for parents, each dollar of net government expenditure yields only $0.46 to $1.32 in benefits, lower than many other education and children's health interventions. We conclude that the economic returns to investing in UPK are high, largely because of full-day UPK's effectiveness as an active labor market policy. |
| JEL: | H43 I20 J13 J24 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33038 |
| By: | Neil A. Cholli; Steven N. Durlauf; Rasmus Landersø; Salvador Navarro |
| Abstract: | Recent research has uncovered large spatial heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility across neighborhoods in countries around the world. Yet there is little consensus on the reasons why mobility is high in some neighborhoods and low in others. This paper analyzes a generalized mobility model that examines the roles that families’ selection into neighborhoods and locational characteristics play in generating this spatial heterogeneity. We use administrative data from Denmark to decompose variation in mobility across nearly 300 larger and 2, 000 smaller neighborhoods along these dimensions, accounting for sampling error. Families’ selection into neighborhoods and sampling error explain most observed heterogeneity across neighborhoods. Our generalized model explains most of the differences in mobility between neighborhoods, though a small but persistent difference remains between neighborhoods that our model cannot account for. An analysis of this “irreducible heterogeneity” suggests that neighborhoods exhibit multiple types in terms of their mobility effects. |
| JEL: | D30 H0 J0 R0 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33035 |