This paper examines the postsecondary enrollment decisions of immigrant students, expanding on previous work by explicitly considering their choices among institution types and by examining differences across generations and racial/ethnic categories. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88), we hypothesize that community colleges may play a more significant role in providing access to higher education for immigrants than for the native-born population. Our results support our hypothesis only among Asian immigrants. First-generation black immigrants have a higher probability of enrolling in private vocational schools, while second-generation Hispanics (and native blacks) have a higher probability of enrolling in both public and private four-year colleges and universities. Survey (1988)
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The Relationship of Personal and Neighborhood Characteristics to Immigrant Fertility
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-20
We find that fertility varies by immigrant generation, with significant declines between the first and subsequent generations for groups with large immigrant population. However, we find that personal characteristics--such as educational attainment, marital status, and income levels--are much more important than immigrant generation in understanding fertility outcomes. In fact, generations are not independently important once these personal characteristics are controlled for. We maintain that declining fertility levels among the descendants of Mexican and Central American immigrants are primarily the result of higher educational attainment levels, lower rates of marriage, and lower poverty. For example, a four-year increase in educational attainment decreases children ever born (CEB) by half a child. We conclude that immigrant generation serves as a proxy for changes in other personal characteristics that decrease fertility. Neighborhood characteristics have some bearing on fertility, but the correlations are relatively weak. Among Mexican and Central American immigrants and their descendants, the most consistent predictor of children ever born (CEB) at the neighborhood level is the percentage of Hispanic adults. However, no neighborhood characteristics bear any statistical relationship to current fertility, the measure that emphasizes recent births. This pattern of evidence suggests that the observed relationships between neighborhood characteristics and fertility are based on selection into the neighborhood rather than on neighborhood influences as such.
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Parent-Child Bargaining, Parental Transfers, and the Postsecondary Education Decision
May 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-13
Economic models of schooling decisions are largely unitary preference in nature. They ignore parent-child conflict, with parents often acting as the sole decisionmaker. In this paper, a theoretical model is formulated in which parents and child participate in cooperative bargaining as a means of resolving disagreements. The model's implications are compared to those of the unitary preference model, motivating tests of parental altruism and income pooling. Reduced form equations for years of postsecondary schooling and transfers are estimated, both for the full sample and for subsamples defined by type of disagreement, using student-level data from the National Center for Education Statistics' High School and Beyond Surveys. While income pooling is rejected only for the group of students who prefer more schooling than their parents, parental altruism is rejected for all groups. A major finding is that parent-child disagreement is an important determinant of the level of financial support parents provide.
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Cheaper by the Dozen: Using Sibling Discounts at Catholic Schools to Estimate the Price Elasticity of Private School Attendance
October 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-34
The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private schooling. We exploit a unique and previously undocumented source of variation in private school tuition to estimate this key parameter. A majority of Catholic elementary schools offer discounts to families that enroll more than one child in the school in a given year. Catholic school tuition costs therefore depend upon the interaction of the number and spacing of a family's children with the pricing policies of the local school. This within-neighborhood variation in tuition prices allows us to control for unobserved determinants of demand with a fine set of geographic fixed effects, while still identifying the price parameter. We use data from 3700 Catholic schools, matched to restricted Census data that identifies geography at the block level. We find that a standard deviation decrease in tuition prices increases the probability that a family will send its children to private school by one-half percentage point, which translates into an elasticity of Catholic school attendance with respect to tuition costs of -0.19. Our subgroup results suggest that a voucher program would disproportionately induce into private schools those who, along observable dimensions, are unlike those who currently attend private school.
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DO PUBLIC TUITION SUBSIDIES PROMOTE COLLEGE ENROLLMENT? EVIDENCE FROM COMMUNITY COLLEGE TAXING DISTRICTS IN TEXAS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-32
This paper estimates the effect of tuition rates on college enrollment using data for Texas from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses and the 2004 ' 2010 American Community Surveys and geographical data on Community College Taxing Districts. The effect of tuition on enrollment is identified by the facts that tuition rates for those living within a taxing district are lower than those living outside the taxing district and in Texas not all geographic locations are in a taxing district. While the estimated effect of tuition on enrollment depends on the sample used, it is negative and mostly statistically significant in the samples of iadults 18 and older and negative and sometimes statistically significant in the samples of traditional age students 18 to 24. The estimated effect of tuition on enrollment, however, is found to vary considerably by poverty level status with an increase in tuition rates having a statistically significant negative effect on college enrollment for those with household incomes that are at least 200% of the poverty level both for traditional aged students 18 to 24 years old and all adults 18 and older.
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The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation
April 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-11
Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census samples that are linked to Social Security records containing county of birth, we implement event studies that estimate the long run effects of exposure to desegregation orders on human capital and labor market outcomes. We find that African Americans who were relatively young when a desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth, and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools, experienced large improvements in adult human capital and labor market outcomes relative to Blacks who were older when a court order was locally implemented. There are no comparable changes in outcomes among whites in counties undergoing an order, or among Blacks who were beyond school ages when a local order was implemented. These effects are strongly concentrated in the South, with largely null findings in other regions. Our data and methodology provide the most comprehensive national assessment to date on the impacts of court ordered desegregation, and strongly indicate that these policies were in fact highly effective at improving the long run socioeconomic outcomes of many Black students.
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Universal Preschool Lottery Admissions and Its Effects on Long-Run Earnings and Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-09
We use an admissions lottery to estimate the effect of a universal (non-means tested) preschool program on students' long-run earnings, income, marital status, fertility and geographic mobility. We observe long-run outcomes by linking both admitted and non-admitted individuals to confidential administrative data including tax records. Funding for this preschool program comes from an Indigenous organization, which grants Indigenous students admissions preference and free tuition. We find treated children have between 5 to 6 percent higher earnings as young adults. The results are strongest for individuals from the lower half of the household income distribution in childhood. Likely mechanisms include high-quality teachers and curriculum.
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Intergenerational Transmission of Race: Permeable Boundaries between 1970 and 2010
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-24
We study the social construction of race boundaries by investigating patterns in the race, ancestry, and Mexican origin responses provided for children of 14 types of interracial marriages using dense restricted-use data from 1970 to 2010. Our broader purpose is to expose social processes that convert a newborn child of mixed heritage into an adult person of a particular race. We include a more diverse set of families, a longer time span, and more accurate estimates than prior research. These expansions bear fruit.Taking ancestry responses into account and studying the longer-term patterns reveals that mixed-heritage responses have been common since 1980. Expanding the types of mixed heritage and including double-minorities shows that there is substantial variation in response patterns across the 14 groups.
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Is Subsidized Childcare Associated with Lower Risk of Grade Retention for Low-Income Children? Evidence from Child Care and Development Fund Administrative Records Linked to the American Community Survey
June 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-06
This study investigates whether low-income young children's experience of Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)-subsidized childcare is associated with a lower subsequent likelihood of being held back in grades K-12. High-quality childcare has been shown to improve low-income children's school readiness. However, no previous study has examined the link specifically between subsidized care and grade retention. I do so here by matching information on children from CCDF administrative records to later observations of the same children in the American Community Survey (ACS). I use logistic regression to compare the likelihood of grade retention between CCDF-recipient children and non-recipient children who also appear in the ACS in the years 2008-2014 (N=2,284,857). I find strong evidence for an association between CCDF-subsidized care and lower risk of grade retention, especially among non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children. I also find evidence that receiving CCDF-subsidized center-based care in particular is associated with a lower risk of being held back than CCDF-subsidized family daycare, babysitter care, or relative care, again with the largest apparent benefit to non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children.
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Do Alternative Opportunities Matter? The Role of Female Labor Markets in the Decline of Teacher Quality
July 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-22
This paper documents the widely perceived but little investigated notion that teachers today are less qualified than they once were. Using standardized test scores, undergraduate institution selectivity, and positive assortative mating characteristics as measures of quality, evidence of a marked decline in the quality of young women going into teaching between 1960 and 1990 is presented. In contrast, the quality of young women becoming professionals increased. The Roy model of selfselection is used to highlight how occupation differences in the returns to skill determine average teacher quality. Estimates suggest the significance of increasing professional opportunities for women in affecting the decline in teacher quality.
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Bank Crises and Investor Confidence
January 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-02
In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the crisis. In order to isolate the effects of financial crises on investor confidence, we study the investment behavior of immigrants in the U.S. Our findings indicate that systemic banking crises have important effects on investor behavior. Immigrants who have experienced a banking crisis in their countries of origin are significantly less likely to have bank accounts in the U.S. This finding is robust to including important individual controls like wealth, education, income, and age. In addition, the effect of crises is robust to controlling for a variety of country of origin characteristics, including measures of financial and economic development and specifications with country of origin fixed effects.
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