We study the effects of a change in financial aid policy introduced by a Northeastern university in 1998. Prior to that time, the university’s financial aid packages for low income students consisted of grants, loans, and campus jobs. After the change, the entire loan portion of the package...

One justification offered for legacy admissions policies at universities is that that they bind entire families to the university. Proponents maintain that these policies have a number of benefits, including increased donations from members of these families. We use a rich set of data from an...

The “iron law of fundraising” says that people do not donate to a charity unless they are asked. We test the iron law using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Devel-opment...

We study the effects of a change in financial aid policy introduced by a Northeastern university in 1998. Prior to that time, the university’s financial aid packages for low income students consisted of grants, loans, and campus jobs. After the change, the entire loan portion of the package...

The U.S. mortgage market has experienced phenomenal change over the last 35 years. Most observers believe that the deregulation of the banking industry and financial markets generally has played an important part in this transformation. This paper develops and implements a technique for...

We use a sample of full-time workers mostly over 50 years of age from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study to investigate whether workers in federal, state, and local government receive more generous wage and pension compensation than private sector workers, ceteris...

There is considerable public policy concern over the relatively low rates of health insurance coverage among the self-employed in the United States. Presumably, the reason for the concern is that their low rates of insurance lead to worse health outcomes. We use data from the Medical Expenditure...

We investigate how undergraduates’ financial aid packages affect their subsequent dona-tive behavior as alumni. The empirical work is based upon a rich set of micro data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we call Anon U. We focus on three types of financial aid,...

Governor Romney has proposed a personal income tax reform that would lower marginal tax rates and broaden the tax base. Critics of the proposal have argued that high-income taxpayers would receive a tax cut, and given that the proposal is meant to be revenue neutral, this would inevitably lead...

Public Finance is the branch of economics that studies the taxing and spending activities of government. The term is something of a misnomer, because the fundamental issues are not financial (that is, relating to money). Rather, the key problems relate to the use of real resources. For this...