Come and Stay a While: Does Financial Aid Effect Enrollment and Retention at a Large Public University?

[Excerpt] Few studies have examined whether financial aid affects college retention. This paper models the decision to enroll and re-enroll in college, which yields a bivariate probit model that is estimated using detailed individual data from a large public university. The analysis uses the unique detail of institution-specific data to examine the effect of financial aid on the re-enrollment decision, and exploits the sequential college completion process to condition the re-enrollment probabilities for college selection such that the implications are broader than is typical of a single-institution study. Overall, the results indicate that some types of need-based aid improve retention, but that merit-based aid has the largest retention effects and particularly for well-to-do enrollees

Do No-Loan Policies Change the Matriculation Patterns of Low-Income Students?

We empirically examine whether there is discernable variation in the matriculation patterns of low-income students at public flagship institutions in the United States around changes in institutional financial-aid policies that target resident, low-income students with need-based aid. While enrollment responses cannot be attributed to these programs, we do find that institutions that introduce income-targeted aid subsequently enroll financially needier and geographically more-distant students. These findings imply that "improved" access may actually displace some needy students in favor of others.low income, financial aid, no loan, Pell

The backward-bending commute times of married women with household responsibility

The purpose of this paper is to examine theoretically and empirically whether the commute times of married women follow a backward-bending pattern with respect to wage rates. The existing literature has shown that married women tend to choose short commutes because of their relatively low wages combined with comparatively heavy household responsibilities. However, a workleisure model, which includes the simultaneous decision wives take regarding commute times and wage rates, suggests that married women employed in highly paid positions also undertake short commutes, while married women with wage rates in the middle range choose long commutes. These results suggest that the commute times of married women display a backward-bending pattern. Applying an instrumental variable strategy that accounts for the endogeneity of wage rates, the empirical results for employed married women in Japan appear to support this nding. Moreover, one of our results suggests that highly paid married women can still secure greater leisure time with short commutes, despite retaining a heavy load of domestic responsibilities.Working Paper, No.234, 2008.9.1版http://hdl.handle.net/10110/254

A Mismatch Made in Heaven: A Hedonic Analysis of Overeducation and Undereducation

33 p.Prior work suggests coordination failure between labour and education markets leads some workers to have educational qualifications in excess of those specified for the job (overeducation) and others to have less (undereducation). This paper empirically models and tests the hypothesis that overeducation and undereducation arise out of a hedonic matching process that maximises net benefits to workers and firms over the life of the match. Specifically, the overeducated begin in low-paying, entry-level jobs early in their careers that prepare them for higher-paying future positions that require their educational background, whereas the undereducated start in lower-paying, exactly-educated jobs that can signal skills necessary for promotion. The empirical model shows that, because all workers are exactly-educated during at least a portion of their career, the type of educational match cannot be directly identified using a cross-section, but may be imputed from the differences between predicted and observed qualifications of the worker and predicted and observed requirements of the firm. The empirical analysis uses a rich cross-section of British working-age males to identify match types. Using contemporaneous, forward- and backward-looking data, we confirm that over and undereducated matches differ in their on-the-job training and promotion opportunities, which yield a trade-off in the pre- versus post-match return to human capital

For Whom the Pell Tolls: Market Power, Tuition Discrimination, and the Bennett Hypothesis

Are federal Pell grants "appropriated" by universities through increases in tuition - consistent with what is known as the Bennett hypothesis? Based on a panel of 71 universities from 1983 to 1996, we find little evidence of the Bennett hypothesis among either public or lower-ranked private universities. For top-ranked private universities, though, increases in Pell grants appear to be more than matched by increases in net tuition. The behavior most consistent with this result is price discrimination that is not purely redistributive from wealthier to needier students

Hope for the Pell? The Impact of Merit-Aid on Needy Students

38 p.Prior empirical evidence finds that merit-aid programs such as the Georgia Hope Scholarship yield large and significant enrollment effects, whereas need-based aid programs such as the Pell Grant yield modest and often insignificant enrollment effects. This paper uses unpublished panel data on the number and level of Pell awards at Southern universities along with detailed institutional data from the National Center of Educational Statistics to examine whether the Georgia Hope Scholarship improved the college access of needy students relative to other Southern states. Fixed-effect analyses show that large increases in merit aid improve college access of needy students and leverage Hope Scholarship funds with greater federal Pell assistance. Whereas most institution-specific increases in both Pell enrollment and funding are found for two-year and less selective, four-year institutions, the results also suggest that Pell students are not crowded out of more selective schools by Hope’s intent to retain the best Georgia high-school students

Asymmetric information, strategic behavior, and discrimination in the labor market

The neoclassical model of labor market discrimination assumes the presence of either prejudiced preferences, biased assessments of worker productivity, or monopsony power. We show that when market agents control asymmetric information, strategic behavior can induce discriminatory hiring practices even when these market features are absent. Moreover, strategic interaction many distort public policies to the point of harming the segments of the work force they were designed to support.