The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings using data on two cohorts of college enrollees drawn from the NLSY-79 and the NLSY-97. We find that student sorting has increased modestly between cohorts,...

The structure and functioning of the market of higher education in the United States possess distinctive if not puzzling features such as the wide spectrum of institutional arrangements and sources of funding, stark segmentation in levels of selectivity and instructional resources, and high...

Using administrative data, we study the role of attribution bias in a high-stakes, consequential decision: the choice of a college major. Specifically, we examine the influence of fatigue experienced during exposure to a general education course on whether students choose the major corresponding...

The Great Recession brought large increases in unemployment and college enrollment; we explore how changing labor market conditions affected the decision to enroll, focusing on the role of state-specific dimensions of Unemployment Insurance (UI) policy. We measure the enrollment response to...

In recent years, many states, including California, Texas, and Oregon, have changed admissions policies to increase access to public universities for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A key concern, however, is how these students will perform. This paper examines the relationship...

The advent of the internet, and more recently of artificial intelligence (AI), has challenged academic and other institutions to ensure ethical practices and reward/promote true merit. The borderless and relatively anonymous nature of the internet creates policing challenges, leading to the...

We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how demand and procurement policy can shape medical innovation. We use machine learning tools to develop new data describing the aspects of medical and mechanical innovations that are emphasized in patent documents. Our analysis of...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of "innovating-by-doing," whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners' ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory research and...

Shortage of nurses is a problem in several countries. It is an unsettled question whether increasing wages constitute a viable policy for extracting more labour supply from nurses. In this paper we use a unique matched panel data set of Norwegian nurses covering the period 1993-1998 to estimate...