14 research outputs found
The Consumption Value of Higher Education
The consumption value of higher education is an important factor behind the individual’s educational choice. We provide a comprehensive literature survey, and define the consumption value as the private, intended, non-pecuniary return to higher education. We provide new empirical evidence for the willingness to pay for the consumption value of a particular type of higher education. Even when controlling for ability selection, we find on US data that Liberal Arts graduates were willing to forego 46 pct. of their potential income in order to enjoy the consumption value of this educational type.educational choice, type of education, non-pecuniary return, willingness to pay, consumption value of education
Playing the system: address manipulation and access to schools
Strategic incentives may lead to inefficient and unequal provision of public
services. A prominent example is school admissions. Existing research shows
that applicants "play the system" by submitting school rankings strategically.
We investigate whether applicants also play the system by manipulating their
eligibility at schools. We analyze this applicant deception in a theoretical
model and provide testable predictions for commonly-used admission procedures.
We confirm these model predictions empirically by analyzing the implementation
of two reforms. First, we find that the introduction of a residence-based
school-admission criterion in Denmark caused address changes to increase by
more than 100% before the high-school application deadline. This increase
occurred only in areas where the incentive to manipulate is high-powered.
Second, to assess whether this behavior reflects actual address changes, we
study a second reform that required applicants to provide additional proof of
place of residence to approve an address change. The second reform
significantly reduced address changes around the school application deadline,
suggesting that the observed increase in address changes mainly reflects
manipulation. The manipulation is driven by applicants from more affluent
households and their behavior affects non-manipulating applicants.
Counter-factual simulations show that among students not enrolling in their
first listed school, more than 25% would have been offered a place in the
absence of address manipulation and their peer GPA is 0.2SD lower due to the
manipulative behavior of other applicants. Our findings show that popular
school choice systems give applicants the incentive to play the system with
real implications for non-strategic applicants