The "misnorming" of the U.S. military entrance examination and its effect on minority enlistments

The score a prospective recruit must earn on the military's entrance examination was raised in 1980 in response to an error discovered in the score scale previously used. Raising this score led to a reduction in enlistments, especially among minorities. Recent plans to reduce the military have also had an adverse impact on service opportunities for minority applicants. This paper considers empirical and theoretical aspects of the relationship between entrance standards and minority representation in the military, focusing on racial differences in the proportion of qualified applicants who enlist. The results suggest that increases in test score standards have a large impact on minority enlistment not only because minorities have lower scores, but also because qualified minority applicants are far more likely than other qualified applicants to enlist.

What a difference a term makes:the effect of educational attainment on marital outcomes in the UK

Abstract In the past, students in England and Wales born within the first 5 monthsof the academic year could leave school one term earlier than those born later inthe year. Focusing on women, those who were required to stay on an extra termmore frequently hold some academic qualification. Using having been required tostay on as an exogenous factor affecting academic attainment, we find that holding alow-level academic qualification has no effect on the probability of being currentlymarried for women aged 25 or above, but increases the probability of the husbandholding some academic qualification and being economically active.33 Halama

Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Intrusiveness

We use data from a large-scale field experiment to explore what influences the effectiveness of online advertising. We find that matching an ad to website content and increasing an ad's obtrusiveness independently increase purchase intent. However, in combination, these two strategies are ineffective. Ads that match both website content and are obtrusive do worse at increasing purchase intent than ads that do only one or the other. This failure appears to be related to privacy concerns: the negative effect of combining targeting with obtrusiveness is strongest for people who refuse to give their income and for categories where privacy matters most. Our results suggest a possible explanation for the growing bifurcation in Internet advertising between highly targeted plain text ads and more visually striking but less targeted ads

Who Benefits from KIPP?

Charter schools affiliated with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education. These schools feature a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

Regression Discontinuity Designs with Clustered Data

Regression discontinuity designs have become popular in empirical studies due to their attractive properties for estimating causal effects under transparent assumptions. Nonetheless, most popular procedures assume i.i.d. data, which is unreasonable in many common applications. To fill this gap, we derive the properties of traditional local polynomial estimators in a fixed- setting that allows for cluster dependence in the error term. Simulation results demonstrate that accounting for clustering in the data while selecting bandwidths may lead to lower MSE while maintaining proper coverage. We then apply our cluster-robust procedure to an application examining the impact of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits on neighborhood characteristics and low-income housing supply

Individual Heterogeneity in the Returns to Schooling: Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression Using Twins Data

Considerable effort has been exercised in estimating mean returns to education while carefully considering biases arising from unmeasured ability and measurement error. Recent work has investigated whether there are variations from the “mean” return to education across the population with mixed results. We use an instrumental variables estimator for quantile regression on a sample of twins to estimate an entire family of returns to education at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages while addressing simultaneity and measurement error biases. We test whether there is individual heterogeneity in returns to education and find that: more able individuals obtain more schooling and that higher ability individuals (those further to the right in the conditional distribution of wages) have higher returns to schooling consistent with a non-trivial interaction between schooling and unobserved abilities in the generation of earnings. The estimated returns are never lower than 9 percent and can be as high as 13 percent at the top of the conditional distribution of wages but they vary significantly only along the lower to middle quantiles. Our findings may have meaningful implications for the design of educational policies

Are there asymmetries in the effects of training on the conditional male wage distribution?

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel, we utilise both ordinary least squares and QR techniques to estimate associations between work-related training and wages for private sector men in ten European Union countries. Our results show that, for the majority of countries, there is a fairly uniform association between training and hourly wages across the conditional wage distribution. However, there are considerable differences across countries in mean associations between training and wages

Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets

Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that identify causal factors determining the willingness of buyers to pay voluntarily under PWYW. Furthermore, to see how competition affects the viability of PWYW, we implement markets in which a PWYW seller competes with a traditional seller. Finally, we endogenize the market structure and let sellers choose their pricing strategy. The experimental results show that outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations to keep the seller in the market can explain why and how much buyers pay voluntarily to a PWYW seller. We find that PWYW can be viable in isolation, but it is less successful as a competitive strategy because it does not drive traditional posted-price sellers out of the market. Instead, the existence of a posted-price competitor reduces buyers’ payments and prevents the PWYW seller from fully penetrating the market. If given the choice, the majority of sellers opt for setting a posted price rather than a PWYW pricing. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of PWYW as a marketing strategy