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College Tuition and Income Inequality
This paper evaluates the role of rising income inequality in explaining observed growth in college tuition. We develop a competitive model of the college market in which college quality depends on instructional expenditure and the average ability of admitted students. An innovative feature of our model is that it allows for a continuous distribution of college quality. We find that observed increases in US income inequality can explain more than the entire observed rise in average net tuition since 1990 and that rising income inequality has also depressed college attendance.
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The Great Resignation and Optimal Unemployment Insurance
How generous should social insurance be when quits account for a large share of transitions into non-employment? We address this question using a multi-sector directed search model extended to incorporate endogenous quits both to other jobs and to non-employment. Workers quit too often in the competitive equilibrium, and private markets co-ordinate on excessively high “efficiency” wages. Quantitatively, we find that unemployment insurance is optimally much less generous in an economy with quits than in one without. An extended Baily-Chetty formula is derived to illustrate the source of ...