College access, human capital and life-cycle risk
These papers treat schooling as a decision made under uncertainty, repeatedly, over a working life, rather than once at 18. They ask who benefits from flexible access to college, how risk and wealth enter the schooling decision through the psychic cost of school, and how labor-market frictions change the welfare consequences of contracts and careers.
- Better Late Than Never: Macroeconomic Impact of Intermittent College Enrollment and Tuition Subsidies
Allowing people to enroll in college at any age, rather than only right after high school, accounts for about one quarter of the total welfare value of college in a life-cycle general equilibrium model; the gain is largest for people who start adult life with the least wealth. A nationwide tuition-free program raises the share with a bachelor’s degree from 25 to 78 percent and welfare by nearly 40 percent. - How Much Does Schooling Disutility Matter?
Adding a disutility-of-schooling term to a structural education-choice model is equivalent to assuming a relationship between wealth, risk and schooling: with the term present, the utility return to education falls with wealth and, when agents have a precautionary saving motive, rises with the riskiness of future consumption. - Welfare Under Friction and Uncertainty: General Equilibrium Evaluation of Temporary Employment in the U.S.
In a U.S.-calibrated general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, temporary contracts act as a buffer against firing costs and rising firm-level risk, reducing the welfare loss from higher firing costs by about 1.3 percent, but they do not restore the efficiency lost to those frictions and are not equivalent to cutting firing costs. - The Effect of College Major on Labor Market Outcomes of Chinese Immigrants: An Examination of Undergraduate Major Choices and Their Impact on Employment and Earnings
Among college-educated Chinese immigrant men in the 2009 American Community Survey, 36 percent majored in engineering and all five most common majors were in STEM or business, a pattern statistically different from Japanese and Korean immigrants and native-born whites; a major’s popularity among Chinese immigrants is weakly and positively related to its employment probability and earnings.