Research

Shaping inequality and intergenerational persistence of poverty: Free college or better schools? (with Dirk Krueger and Alexander Ludwig)

Published in Journal of Monetary Economics, CRNYU Special Issue, 2024

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with intergenerational linkages, a higher education choice as well as a multi-stage human capital production process during childhood and adolescence with parental and government schooling investments. The model features rich cross-sectional heterogeneity, distinguishes between single and married parents, and is disciplined by US household survey data on income, wealth, education and time use. Studying the transitions induced by unexpected policy reforms we show that the “free college” and the “better schools” reform generate significant welfare gains, which take time to materialize and are lower in general than in partial equilibrium. It is optimal to combine both reforms: tuition subsidies make college affordable even for children from poorer parental backgrounds and better schools increase human capital thereby reducing dropout risk.

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The Fiscal and Welfare Effects of Policy Responses to the Covid-19 School Closures (with Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln, Dirk Krueger, Andre Kurmann and Alexander Ludwig)

Published in IMF Economic Review, Volume 71, pages 35–98, 2023

Based on data on school visits from Safegraph and on school closures from Burbio, we document that during the Covid-19 crisis secondary schools were closed for in-person learning for longer periods than elementary schools, private schools experienced shorter closures than public schools, and schools in poorer US counties experienced shorter school closures. To quantify the long-run consequences of these school closures, we extend the structural life cycle model of private and public schooling investments by Fuchs-Schündeln et al. (Econ J 132:1647–1683, 2022) to include private school choice and feed into the model the school closure measures from our empirical analysis. Future earnings and welfare losses are largest for children that started public secondary schools at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Comparing children from the top to children from the bottom quartile of the income distribution, welfare losses are 0.5 percentage points larger for the poorer children if school closures were unrelated to income. Accounting for the longer school closures in richer counties reduces this gap by about 1/4. A policy intervention that extends schools by 6 weeks generates significant welfare gains for children and raises future tax revenues sufficient to pay for the cost of this schooling expansion.

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The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures (with Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln, Dirk Krueger and Alexander Ludwig)

Published in The Economic Journal, Volume 132, Issue 645, July 2022, Pages 1647–1683, 2022

Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterise the long-term consequences from a COVID-19-induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of ⁠, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about of permanent consumption. Because of self-productivity in the human capital production function, younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets.

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Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave (with Chris Busch, Dirk Krueger, Alex Ludwig and Zainab Iftikhar)

Published in Journal of Monetary Economics, 2020

In 2015–2016 Germany experienced a wave of predominantly low-skilled refugee immigration. We evaluate its macroeconomic and distributional effects using a quantitative overlapping generations model calibrated using German micro data to replicate education and productivity differentials between foreign born and native workers. Workers are modelled as imperfect substitutes in aggregate production leading to endogenous wage differentials. We simulate the dynamic effects of this refugee wave, with specific focus on the welfare impact on low skilled natives. Our results indicate that the small losses this group suffers can be compensated by welfare gains of other parts of the native population.

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