Five Facts About the First-Generation Excellence Gap -- by Uditi Karna, John A. List, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida
Parents are crucial to children’s educational success, but the role of parental education in fostering academic excellence remains underexplored. Using longitudinal administrative data covering all North Carolina public school students, we document five facts about first-generation excellence gaps. We find large excellence gaps emerge by 3rd grade across all demographics and persist through high school. Yet, socioeconomic status and school quality explain only one-third of the gaps. The overarching facts reveal that excellence gaps re-flect deeper challenges rooted in parental human capital that manifest early and compound over time, rather than merely consequences of socioeconomic disadva..
NBER > Working PapersLatent Polarization -- by Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, Romain Wacziarg
We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values, using fractional hedonic games as a theoretical foundation. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. We implement this method empirically using U.S. data from the World Values Survey. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of values polarization between voters of the two main political parties has steadily increased since the 1990s, and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Thus, g..
NBER > Working PapersPreferences, Beliefs, and Demand for the Flu Vaccine -- by Daniel W. Sacks, Justin R. Sydnor
Can economic tools help inform the puzzlingly low rate of flu vaccination? Existing interventions focus on misinformation or nudges, not preferences over or beliefs about vaccine characteristics. Using an online experiment, we find a key role for effectiveness and short-run side-effects: equalizing only beliefs and preferences about these characteristics nearly eliminates the vaccination-intention gap between the vaccine hesitant and confident. Fear of needles, inconvenience, and perceived long run health risks play smaller roles. The vaccine hesitant hold pessimistic but plausible beliefs about effectiveness but greatly overestimate side-effect risks. We estimate the impact of correcting in..
NBER > Working PapersHappier at Work? The Impact of Working at an Employee-Owned Firm and Working from Home on Job Satisfaction -- by Richard B. Freeman, Huanan Xu
This paper examines the impact of working for an ESOP firm and Working-From-Home (WFH) on job satisfaction in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and the General Social Science (GSS) survey. It finds that job satisfaction is higher for employees in ESOPs than for observationally similar workers in non-ESOP firms and for WFH workers than for their non-WFH peers. Fixed effect analysis of the NLSY97 finds that both ESOP and WFH employment raise job satisfaction for the same worker when he/she changes work status. The channels through which the two conditions raise satisfaction appear to differ: ESOPs raise satisfaction by increasing worker participation on collective workpla..
NBER > Working PapersShould States Reduce Teacher Licensing Requirements? Evidence from the Rise of For-Profit Training Programs in Texas -- by Christa Deneault, Evan Riehl
We provide a comprehensive analysis of a Texas policy that relaxed teacher licensing requirements and created a large for-profit training industry. Using detailed administrative data, we show that for-profit-trained teachers have higher turnover and lower value-added than standard-trained teachers. But the policy significantly increased the supply of certified teachers, reducing schools' reliance on uncertified teachers with even worse outcomes. Exploiting variation in policy exposure across schools, we find a zero net impact on student achievement due to these offsetting forces. Thus lower licensing requirements improved access to teaching and reduced training costs without harming students..
NBER > Working PapersEfficiency Costs of Incomplete Markets -- by David R. Baqaee, Ariel Burstein
This paper quantifies misallocation caused by limited risk-sharing and imperfect consumption-smoothing. We measure these losses in terms of how much of society's resources would be left over if financial markets were complete and each consumer were compensated to maintain their status-quo welfare. Using exact formulas and approximate sufficient statistics, we analyze standard incomplete-market environments—ranging from closed-economy Bewley-Aiyagari models to multi-country settings with input-output linkages. We find that incomplete insurance against household-level idiosyncratic risk is very costly (about 20% of aggregate consumption) based on both structural models and sufficient-statist..
NBER > Working PapersThe Foreign Currency Fisher Channel: Evidence from Households -- by Győző Gyöngyösi, Judit Rariga, Emil Verner
We study how foreign currency debt exposure shapes household adjustment to a large exchange rate depreciation. Using household survey and bank customer data during Hungary's 2008 currency crisis, we find that foreign currency borrowers cut consumption one-for-one with increased debt service, consistent with a foreign currency Fisher channel. Both the quantity and quality of expenditures decline, indicating a "flight from quality." Debt revaluation has a limited effect on overall labor supply, but there is substitution toward foreign income and home production. Our findings point to the relevance of open-economy models with incomplete markets, heterogeneous foreign currency exposures, and liq..
NBER > Working PapersIs Managed Care Effective in Long-term Care Settings? Evidence from Medicare Institutional Special Needs Plans -- by Momotazur Rahman, Brian McGarry, Elizabeth M. White, David C. Grabowski, Cyrus M. Kosar
Nursing homes face unique financial incentives that encourage under-investment in onsite clinical capabilities and overreliance on hospitals to triage and care for residents with dementia, contributing to high levels of health care spending for this population. A proposed solution to align incentives are Institutional Special Needs Plans (I-SNPs), which combine capitated financing with plan-provided onsite clinician presence. Using 12 million resident-quarters of data from 2016-2022, we exploit the timing of nursing homes’ I-SNP contracting to instrument for plan enrollment and estimate causal effects on hospitalization and other health outcomes. We found that I-SNP enrollment reduced quar..
NBER > Working PapersTariffs, Manufacturing Employment, and Supply Chains -- by Joseph B. Steinberg
I use a dynamic general-equilibrium model with supply-chain adjustment frictions to study the effects of tariffs on manufacturing employment. The model has four distinct manufacturing sectors: upstream goods with high trade elasticities (“oil”); upstream goods with low trade elasticities (“steel”); downstream goods with high trade elasticities (“toys”); and downstream goods with low trade elasticities (“cars”). I find that tariffs can increase overall manufacturing employment in the long run, but are likely to reduce it in the short run, and cause more reallocation of workers across these individual sectors than overall employment growth
NBER > Working PapersRegulating Biological Resources: Lessons From Marine Fisheries in the United States -- by Eyal G. Frank, Kimberly Oremus
In 1996, with United States fish populations in decline, Congress overhauled fishing laws with scientific thresholds for rebuilding overfished stocks. The law's impact is contested, and lawmakers have spent over a decade debating its reauthorization while countries around the world consider similar policies. We develop the first causally interpretable evaluation of this law, exploiting the fact that the European Union has comparable fisheries but only recently developed similar laws. Compiling comprehensive data on US and EU fishery status and management, we examine fish populations that decline to unhealthy levels and measure the effect of a policy that aims to rebuild them to health. We fi..
NBER > Working PapersMeasuring Neighborhood Change: The Issue of Ex Post Borders -- by Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, Braydon Neiszner
Do more populous neighborhoods grow less quickly than less populous areas? Is local housing price growth associated with initial population density? The Longitudinal Tract Data Base’s (LTDB) panel of Census tracts is the standard tool for measuring neighborhood change. The LTDB is based on 2010 Census tract boundaries, and Census tracts are partially designed so that they have a similar level of population. In this paper, we show that defining neighborhoods to equalize ex post population levels can significantly impact estimated coefficients in regressions in which population changes are regressed on initial population levels or with variables that are correlated with initial population le..
NBER > Working PapersSocial Substitution? Time Use Responses to Increased Workplace Isolation -- by Benjamin W. Cowan, Todd R. Jones
This paper examines how people adjust their time use when they experience an increase in time spent alone, which is a growing share of adults’ lives. We utilize the dramatic rise in remote work following the onset of the pandemic, which is associated with a large decline in time spent in the physical presence of non-household members during the workday, to observe the extent to which individuals substitute toward more in-person interactions in non-work settings. We first document that on days that individuals work from home, they spend 3.5 additional hours in activities spent entirely alone and over 5 fewer hours in activities that include any non-household members. We then use a differenc..
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