Dave E. Marcotte

The Returns of a Community College Education: Evidence From the National Education Longitudinal Survey

Using the 2000 follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Survey, the authors estimated earnings effects of a community college education. Previous research relied on data collected from students enrolled 20 or 30 years ago. Because the labor market and community colleges have changed dramatically since then, the authors provide an update by studying students enrolled in the 1990s. They found substantial evidence that a community college education has positive effects on earnings among young workers. This effect was larger for annual earnings than for hourly wages. Earnings benefits accrued both to those who failed to earn a credential and to those who earned an associate degree. The current results are similar to estimates for earlier cohorts. The stability of the wage advantage of a community college education during a period of growing enrollment provides evidence of a growing relative demand for a community college over a high school education.

The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes

Previous studies attempting to estimate the relative importance of family, neighborhood, residential stability, and homeownership status characteristics of childhood environments on young adult outcomes have: (1) treated these variables as though they were independent, and (2) were limited in their ability to control for household selection effects. This study offers advances in both areas. First, it treats the key explanatory variables above as endogenously determined (sometimes simultaneously so). Second, to deal both with this endogeneity and the selection problem, instrumental variable estimates are computed for how childhood average values of neighborhood poverty rate relate to fertility, education and labor market outcomes in later life. The paper analyzes data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that are matched with Census tract data, thereby permitting documentation of a wide range of family background and contextual characteristics. For children born between 1968 and 1974, data are analyzed on their first 18 years and various outcomes in 1999 when they are between 25 and 31 years of age. The application of instrumental variables substantially attenuates the apparent neighborhood effects. Nevertheless, support is found for the proposition that cumulative neighborhood poverty effects averaged over childhood have an independent, non-trivial causal effect on high school attainment and earnings.

Estimating the employment and earnings costs of mental illness: recent developments in the United States

Substantial attention has recently been focused on both the prevalence and consequences of mental illness. Generally, public interest in the costs of mental illness has been limited to the direct costs of treating the mentally ill. In this paper, we consider the magnitude and importance of a major component of the indirect costs of mental illness: employment and earnings losses. We first describe the technical difficulties involved in estimating these costs. We then describe new data and recent advances in the United States that have improved our ability to make such estimates. Our conclusions from the recent research are that each year in the United States 5-6 million workers between the ages of 16 and 54 lose, fail to seek, or cannot find employment as a consequence of mental illness. Among those who do work, we estimate that mental illness decreases annual income by an amount between

Unscheduled School Closings and Student Performance

3,500 and

The Economics of Suicide, Revisited

6,000. We then discuss an emerging challenge to the traditional method for arriving at such estimates: the friction cost approach. We describe both the conceptual and technical differences between the friction cost method and the traditional human capital approach. We conclude that while economic context has much to do with whether one relies on human capital or friction cost estimates, each can offer useful information about labor market losses due to mental illness.

The Effects of Parents' Psychiatric Disorders on Children's High School Dropout.

Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the third, fifth, and eighth grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the fact that tests are administered on the same day(s) statewide in late winter or early spring, so any unscheduled closings due to snow reduce instruction time and are not made up until after the exams are over. We estimate that in academic years with an average number of unscheduled closures (five), the number of third graders performing satisfactorily on state reading and math assessments within a school is nearly 3 percent lower than in years with no school closings. The impacts of closure are smaller for students in fifth and eighth grades. Combining our estimates with actual patterns of unscheduled closings in the last three years, we find that more than half of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in third-grade math or reading, required under No Child Left Behind, would have met AYP if schools had been open on all scheduled days.

The Earnings Effect of Education at Community Colleges

Only a small fraction of suicide attempts are fatal. Nonfatal attempts might elicit resources and care from others, enhancing economic prospects for those who survive. I expand the standard utility-maximizing model of suicide to include a nontrivial probability of survival and the possibility that the utility function may be affected by the suicide attempt. This expanded model predicts that suicide attempts are more likely when future income may be positively affected by the attempt, conditional on survival. Data from the National Comorbidity Survey show that ex post, individuals who made a suicide attempt had higher incomes than peers who seriously considered suicide but who never made a suicide attempt. Moreover, those who reported making the most serious attempts experienced the largest subsequent effects on income.

The impact of parental homeownership on children's outcomes during early adulthood

Abstract Mental illness is known to impose substantial direct costs on the ill. In this paper, we examine an indirect cost of mental illness. We investigate the effect of parents’ mental illnesses on the schooling of their children. Using data from the National Comorbidity Survey, we find that parents’ mental illnesses increase the probability of high school dropout of children, though these effects differ markedly with disease. We also find that parental mental illness has more consistently negative effects on girls than on boys. These findings indicate that parental mental illness can have a powerful impact on children’s schooling and subsequently on their adult lives. The larger impact on girls’ schooling compounds the greater earnings and employment losses due to mental illness borne by adult women. Our results suggest that policies designed to mitigate the effects of parental mental illness on children’s schooling attainment are potentially efficient uses of society’s resources.

EARLY ONSET DEPRESSION AND HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT

In this paper, I make use of data from the 2000 follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS) post-secondary education transcript files to extend what is known about the value of education at community colleges. I examine the effects of enrollment in community colleges on students’ subsequent earnings. I estimate the effects of credits earned separate from credentials because community colleges are often used as a means for students to engage in study not necessarily leading to a degree or certificate. I find consistent evidence of wage and salary effects of both credits and degrees, especially for women. There is no substantial evidence that enrollment in vocational rather than academic coursework has a particularly beneficial effect, however.

CONTINUING EDUCATION, JOB TRAINING, AND THE GROWTH OF EARNINGS INEQUALITY

Abstract Whether children benefit from being raised in a home owned by their parents has important policy implications and has been the topic of much scholarly debate. We match Panel Study of Income Dynamics data with census tract data to examine the impact of childhood experiences on adult outcomes for children followed over three decades. This allows us to document a wide range of characteristics. For children born between 1968 and 1974, we analyze data on their first 18 years and also various outcomes when they are between 25 and 31 in 1999. We control for a comprehensive set of observable parental characteristics and develop a method to control for unobservable child characteristics together with an instrumental variable for the remaining selection problems. Parental homeownership status and childrens college education and home‐ownership status are closely related, although the former is generated partially by the greater residential stability associated with homeownership.