Elizabeth M. Caucutt

Higher Education Subsidies and Heterogeneity, A Dynamic Analysis

In this paper, we develop a simple dynamic general equilibrium framework that can be used to study issues in higher education policy. The model features heterogeneity in income of parents and academic ability of students. Liquidity constraints create persistence in educational attainment even when ability is independently distributed. A unique steady state with a positive fraction of college educated workers, or one with a development trap, or multiple steady states which feature both of these, can result in equilibrium. We add a government that is equipped with a simple tax scheme and calibrate the model to the US economy to get a benchmark for our policy analysis. The government can design a tax and subsidy scheme that guarantees equality of opportunity, but only at the expense of a decrease in the efficiency of utilization of education resources; the welfare gain is minimal. A policy that aims to maximize the fraction of college-educated labor, by sending as many children as possible to college, results in a big drop in the above-mentioned efficiency with little or no welfare gain. If the government has the political will to use any available signal on ability and provide merit-based aid, it can increase this efficiency with little decrease in welfare. Education subsidies may be a potent tool for countries that are caught in a development trap; a sufficient level of subsidy can cause the economy to emerge from the trap.

Durability Versus Concentration as an Explanation for Price Inflexibility

We document the extent of price rigidity across United States manufacturing industries in the 1980s and early 1990s and compare rigidity across different phases of the business cycle. We measure price rigidity in three ways – each under four different sets of assumptions. We take an approach that relies on disaggregated data; we look at price patterns for over 4000 individual manufactured commodities. Both durability and seller concentration are found to be important factors explaining differences in price rigidity across industrial product classes. Using our data, we replicate the regression results found in Carlton (1986) that were based on actual transaction prices from the 1960s.

Peer group effects in applied general equilibrium

Summary. In this paper, I develop an applied general equilibrium environment with peer group effects. The application I consider is schooling. The framework used here is general equilibrium with clubs. I establish the existence of equilibrium for the economy with a finite number of school types. This result is then extended to the case where the set of school types is a continuum. The two welfare theorems are shown to hold for both economies. To compute the equilibrium, I construct a Negishi mapping from the set of weights on individual types utility to the set of transfers that support the corresponding Pareto allocations as competitive equilibria with transfers. Because this mapping is a correspondence, a version of Scarfs algorithm is used to find a competitive equilibrium.

The Timing of Births: A Marriage Market Analysis

We argue that one of the key channels linking the labor and marriage markets is the decision of when to become a parent. We develop art equilibrium model of marriage, divorce, and human capital accumulation that allows for differential timing of fertility. We calibrate the model to US panel data and analyze the effects of raising womens wages relative to mens, and increasing the rate of return to experience for women. We find that an increase in the returns to experience for women is causes an increase in fraction of children born to women over age 30, and that raising women wages reduces marriage rates.

Africa: Is Aid an Answer?

We address the poverty trap rationale for aid to Africa. We calibrate models that embody typical explanations for stagnation: coordination failures, ineffective mix of occupational choices and imperfect capital markets, and insufficient human capital accumulation coupled with high fertility. Calibration is ideally suited for this evaluation given the paucity of high-quality data, the high degree of model nonlinearity, and the need for conducting counterfactual policy experiments. We find that calibrations that yield multiple equilibria -- one being prosperity and the other stagnation -- are not particularly robust in capturing the African situation. This tempers optimism about foreign aid typically prescribed based on models of multiplicity. Moreover, conditional on multiplicity, the calibrated models indicate that the cost of policy interventions needed to trigger development in stagnant economies is small. The lack of reforms in Africa, despite the low estimated costs, suggests political hurdles to reform. It is not clear that foreign aid would be able to circumvent these. Taken together, we conclude that the case for foreign aid to Africa is weak.

Correlation, Consumption, Confusion, or Constraints: Why do Poor Children Perform so Poorly?

The economic and social mobility of a generation may be largely determined by the time it enters school given early developing and persistent gaps in child achievement by family income and the importance of adolescent skill levels for educational attainment and lifetime earnings. After providing new evidence of important differences in early child investments by family income, we study four leading mechanisms thought to explain these gaps: an intergenerational correlation in ability, a consumption value of investment, information frictions, and credit constraints. In order to better determine which of these mechanisms influence family investments in children, we evaluate the extent to which these mechanisms also explain other important stylized facts related to the marginal returns on investments and the effects of parental income on child investments and skills.

Evolution Of The Income Distribution And Education Vouchers

In this paper, I study the effect that switching to a voucher system of educational finance has on the distribution of income. The model is calibrated to U.S. data, and simulated for two different forms of education finance: a voucher system and a completely private system of schools. All voucher policies considered result in welfare gains and reductions in income inequality. A private system entails a welfare loss and an increase in income inequality. The more important the peer group is to future income, the smaller the welfare gains and reductions in inequality associated with voucher systems, and the greater the welfare cost and increase in inequality associated with a private system.

Correlation, Consumption, Confusion, or Constraints: Why Do Poor Children Perform so Poorly?

The economic and social mobility of a generation may be largely determined by the time it enters school given early developing and persistent gaps in child achievement by family income and the importance of adolescent skill levels for educational attainment and lifetime earnings. After providing new evidence of important differences in early child investments by family income, we study four leading mechanisms thought to explain these gaps: an intergenerational correlation in ability, a consumption value of investment, information frictions, and credit constraints. In order to better determine which of these mechanisms influence family investments in children, we evaluate the extent to which these mechanisms also explain other important stylized facts related to the marginal returns on investments and the effects of parental income on child investments and skills.

Policies to Free a Trapped Economy: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa

In this paper, we argue that the condition of education and the economy of the low performing sub-Saharan African countries can be characterized as a stagnant steady state -- a trap. We present a simple heterogeneous-agent model in which high costs of education relative to income and the skill premium can cause the economy to be trapped in such a steady state with minimal educational attainment. We calibrate the model to available data from the sub-Saharan African countries to study policies that could potentially free these trapped economies and set them on a path to a higher steady state. We find that a tax and subsidy scheme that redistributes resources at the trap from poor households with lower ability children to those with higher ability children can pry the economy out of the trap, thus freeing it from dependence on foreign aid in order to achieve the same goal. In addition to the direct cost, a portion of the indirect cost also needs to be subsidized. Moreover, such a policy outperforms the abolition of child labor and the institution and enforcement of compulsory education laws when expenditure neutral welfare comparisons are made.

Robustness of the relationship between price variability and inflation for US manufacturing

We study the relationship between relative price variability and inflation in two different ways. We first look at product-class census unit values for five time periods between 1958 and 1982, and find evidence of a positive relationship between variability and inflation. Then we directly update the Vining and Elwertowski (1976) study for the period 1974-91, using individual commodity series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We conclude by discussing differences across industries in price stickiness.