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Working Paper
Un-Fortunate Sons: Effects of the Vietnam Draft Lottery on the Next Generation's Labor Market
Can shocks to one generation propagate to the next? To answer this question, we study how the Vietnam draft lottery affected the next generation's labor market. Using the universe of federal tax returns, we link fathers from draft cohorts to their sons' outcomes and find that sons of fathers randomly called by the draft 1) have lower earnings and labor force participation than their peers, and 2) are more likely to volunteer for military service. These findings highlight the strong role family plays in human capital development and occupational choice. More generally, our results provide ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Shocks to College Revenues on For-Profit Enrollment: Spillover from the Public Sector
This paper investigates whether declines in public funding for post-secondary institutions have increased for-profit enrollment. The two primary channels through which funding might operate to reallocate students across sectors are price (measured by tuition) and quality (measured by resource constraints). We estimate, on average, that a 10 percent cut in appropriations raises tuition about 1 to 2 percent and decreases faculty resources by 1/2 to 1 percent, creating substantial bottlenecks for prospective students on both price and quality. These cuts, in turn, generate a nearly one ...
Working Paper
Learning from the test: raising selective college enrollment by providing information
In the last decade, five U.S. states adopted mandates requiring high school juniors to take a college entrance exam. In the two earliest-adopting states, nearly half of all students were induced into testing, and 40-45% of them earned scores high enough to qualify for selective schools. Selective college enrollment rose by 20% following implementation of the mandates, with no effect on overall attendance. I conclude that a large number of high-ability students appear to dramatically underestimate their candidacy for selective colleges. Policies aimed at reducing this information shortage are ...
Working Paper
Every Little Bit Counts: The Impact of High-speed Internet on the Transition to College
This paper investigates the effects of high-speed Internet on students' college application decisions. We link the diffusion of zip code-level residential broadband Internet to millions of PSAT and SAT takers' college testing and application outcomes and find that students with access to high-speed Internet in their junior year of high school perform better on the SAT and apply to a higher number and more expansive set of colleges. Effects appear to be concentrated among higher-SES students, indicating that while, on average, high-speed Internet improved students' postsecondary outcomes, it ...
Working Paper
On Intergenerational Immobility : Evidence that Adult Credit Health Reflects the Childhood Environment
Using a novel dataset that links socioeconomic background to future credit, postsecondary education, and federal student loan and grant records, we document that, even though it is not and cannot be used by credit agencies in assigning risk, background is a strong predictor of adult credit health. A relationship remains upon inclusion of achievement, attainment, and debt management metrics. These findings reveal a new dimension along which childhood circumstances persist into adulthood and imply that the many important contexts in which credit scores are relied upon to evaluate individuals ...
Working Paper
A Day Late and a Dollar Short : Liquidity and Household Formation among Student Borrowers
The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for students whose liquidity is otherwise restricted. This paper explores this possibility, using administrative data for the universe of federal student loan borrowers linked to tax records. We examine the effects of a sharp discontinuity in program limits?generated by the timing of a student borrower?s 24th birthday?on household formation early in the lifecycle. After demonstrating that this discontinuity induces a jump in ...
Working Paper
A Wealth of Information: Augmenting the Survey of Consumer Finances to Characterize the Full U.S. Wealth Distribution
We use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to advance U.S. wealth analysis along several dimensions. We develop a comprehensive framework that modifies the SCF to recover the wealth distribution over families, tax units, and individuals from 1989 to 2019. We show that, by ignoring unequal holdings within families, existing estimates considerably understate U.S. inequality across individuals. We find wealth concentration rose through the recent economic recovery, which differs from leading models that capitalize income into wealth even after aligning conceptual differences. We illustrate ...
Working Paper
Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers: Implications for Retirement Preparedness
Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on retirement preparation. We demonstrate that families holding student loan debt later in life have less savings than their similarly educated peers without such debt. However, these comparisons are misleading if the goal is to characterize the experience of the typical student borrower, as they fail to ...
Working Paper
Implications of Student Loan COVID-19 Pandemic Relief Measures for Families with Children
The initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic fallout likely posed particular financial strain on U.S. households with children, who faced income disruptions from widespread jobs and hours cuts in addition to new childcare and instruction demands. One common expense for many such households is their student loan payment. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act included provisions to curb the impacts of these payments, which have been extended several times. These measures were not targeted and thus applied independent of need. This chapter ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Family Economic Well-being: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe disruptions to the U.S. labor market and economic activity. We establish connections between family experiences of the pandemic, their income under normal conditions, and their later economic well-being using the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. By their interview, one-third of families experienced net employment declines, one-third had teleworked, and one-fifth had significant COVID-19-related health events. These experiences strongly reflected families’ positions in the income distribution, with lower-income families bearing the brunt. They also ...