Brandon C. Koford

Estimating the social value of higher education: willingness to pay for community and technical colleges

Abstract Much is known about private financial returns to education in the form of higher earnings. Less is known about how much social value exceeds this private value. Associations between education and socially-desirable outcomes are strong, but disentangling the effect of education from other causal factors is challenging. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the social value of one form of higher education. We elicit willingness to pay for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) directly and compare our estimate of total social value to our estimates of private value in the form of increased earnings. Our earnings estimates are based on two distinct data sets, one administrative and one from the U.S. Census. The difference between the total social value and the increase in earnings is our measure of the education externality and the private, non-market value combined. Our work differs from previous research by focusing on education at the community college level and by eliciting values directly through a stated-preferences survey in a way that yields a total value including any external benefits. Our preferred estimates indicate the social value of expanding the system exceeds private financial value by at least 25% with a best point estimate of nearly 90% and exceeds total private value by at least 15% with a best point estimate of nearly 60%.

Estimating Consumer Willingness to Supply and Willingness to Pay for Curbside Recycling

We estimate the willingness to pay for curbside recycling based on a contingent valuation survey of 600 residents of a large southeastern United States city. The best estimate of willingness to pay for curbside recycling is

Hospital Utilization and Universal Health Insurance Coverage: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act

2.29/month after adjustment for hypothetical bias. We also report the results of a field experiment designed to test the effectiveness of explicit monetary incentives and communication appeals to influence the decision to recycle and the quantity of materials to recycle. While households respond to the monetary cost of recycling, the effects of the token, ex ante incentives and appeals appear to be small. (JEL D61, Q21)

Increasing knowledge retention of business statistics through discipline-specific case studies

ObjectiveThe Affordable Care Act is currently in the roll-out phase. To gauge the likely implications of the national policy we analyze how the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act impacted various hospitalization outcomes in each of the 25 major diagnostic categories (MDC).MethodsWe utilize a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of the Massachusetts reform on insurance coverage and patient outcomes. This identification is achieved using six years of data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. We report MDC-specific estimates of the impact of the reform on insurance coverage and type as well as length of stay, number of diagnoses, and number of procedures.ResultsThe requirement of universal insurance coverage increased the probability of being covered by insurance. This increase was in part a result of an increase in the probability of being covered by Medicaid. The percentage of admissions covered by private insurance fell. The number of diagnoses rose as a result of the law in the vast majority of diagnostic categories. Our results related to length of stay suggest that looking at aggregate results hides a wealth of information. The most disparate outcomes were pregnancy related. The length of stay for new-born babies and neonates rose dramatically. In aggregate, this increase serves to mute decreases across other diagnoses. Also, the number of procedures fell within the MDCs for pregnancy and child birth and that for new-born babies and neonates.ConclusionsThe Massachusetts Health Care Reform appears to have been effective at increasing insurance take-up rates. These increases may have come at the cost of lower private insurance coverage. The number of diagnoses per admission was increased by the policy across nearly all MDCs. Understanding the changes in length of stay as a result of the Massachusetts reform, and perhaps the Affordable Care Act, requires MDC-specific analysis. It appears that the most important distinction to make is to differentiate care related to new-born babies and neonates from that related to other diagnostic categories.

Public Budget Choices and Private Willingness to Pay

Abstract The authors perform a classroom experiment to test the effectiveness of discipline-specific case studies on knowledge acquisition and retention in advanced business statistics courses. The results indicate that although students are more engaged in the case studies, overall there is no impact on acquisition or retention of statistics knowledge by having students engage in discipline-specific case studies relative to traditional case studies. However, for high-performing students, discipline-specific case studies have a positive and significant impact on statistical knowledge retention. Moreover, our research reaffirms past research, which has found greater retention for students with higher grade point average, and there exists a significant negative correlation between retention and time.