Michael F. Lovenheim

The Effect of Liquid Housing Wealth on College Enrollment

This article uses short-run housing wealth changes to identify the effect of housing wealth on college attendance. I find that households used their housing wealth to finance postsecondary enrollment in the 2000s when housing wealth was most liquid; each

Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States

10,000 in home equity raises college enrollment by 0.7 of a percentage point on average. The effect is localized to lower-resource families, for whom a

The Effect of Teachers’ Unions on Education Production: Evidence from Union Election Certifications in Three Midwestern States

10,000 increase in housing wealth increases enrollment by 5.7 percentage points. These estimates imply that the recent housing bust could significantly negatively affect college enrollment through reduction in the housing wealth of families with college-age children.

Do Family Wealth Shocks Affect Fertility Choices? Evidence from the Housing Market

Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the past three decades. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that the increase in time to degree is localized among those who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities. We consider several potential explanations for these trends. First, we show that changes in the college preparedness and the demographic composition of degree recipients cannot account for the observed increases. Instead, our results identify declines in collegiate resources in the less selective public sector and increases in student employment as potential explanations for the observed increases in time to degree.

The fatal toll of driving to drink: the effect of minimum legal drinking age evasion on traffic fatalities.

Using a unique data set on teachers’ union election certifications from Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota, I estimate the effect of teachers’ unions on school district resources and on student educational attainment. My empirical strategy allows for nonparametric leads and lags of union age. I find no impact on teacher pay or per student district expenditures but that unions increase teacher employment by 5%. I find no class size effect because of enrollment increases in unionized districts, and I estimate that unions have no net effect on high school dropout rates. These findings highlight the importance of correctly measuring unionization status.

The Effect of Child Health Insurance Access on Schooling: Evidence from Public Insurance Expansions

This paper uses wealth changes driven by housing market variation to estimate the effect of family resources on fertility decisions. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that a

Incentive Strength and Teacher Productivity: Evidence from a Group-Based Teacher Incentive Pay System

100,000 increase in housing wealth among home owners causes a 16% to 18% increase in the probability of having a child. There is no evidence of an effect of MSA-level housing price growth on the fertility of renters, however. We also present evidence that housing wealth growth increases total fertility and that the responsiveness of fertility to housing wealth has increased over time, commensurate with the recent housing boom.

Changes in Postsecondary Choices by Ability and Income: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth

There is a sizeable literature on the effect of minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) restrictions on teenage drunk driving. This paper adds to the literature by examining the effect of MLDA evasion across states with different alcohol restrictions. Using state-of-the-art GIS software and micro-data on fatal vehicle accidents from 1977 to 2002, we find that in counties within 25 miles of a lower-MLDA jurisdiction, a legal restriction on drinking does not reduce youth involvement in fatal accidents and, for 18 and 19-year-old drivers, fatal accident involvement actually increases. Farther from such a border, we find results consistent with the previous literature that MLDA restrictions are effective in reducing accident fatalities. The estimates imply that, of the total reduction in teenager-involved fatalities due to the equalization of state MLDAs at 21 in the 1970s and 1980s, for 18-year olds between a quarter and a third and for 19-year olds over 15 percent was due to equalization. Furthermore, the effect of changes in the MLDA is quite heterogeneous with respect to the fraction of a states population that need not travel far to cross a border to evade its MLDA. Our results imply the effect of lowering the MLDA in select states, such as has been proposed in Vermont, could lead to sizeable increases in teenage involvement in fatal accidents due to evasion of local alcohol restrictions.

Within-Family Obesity Associations: Evaluation of Parent, Child, and Sibling Relationships

Although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of public health insurance programs on short-run health outcomes, little prior work has examined their long-term effects. We examine the effects of public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment. We find that expanding health insurance coverage for low-income children increases the rate of high school and college completion. These estimates are robust to only using federal Medicaid expansions and mostly are due to expansions that occur when the children are not newborns. Our results indicate that the long-run benefits of public health insurance are substantial.

Quantile Treatment Effects of College Quality on Earnings

We estimate the impact of incentive strength on achievement under a group-based teacher incentive pay program. The system provides variation in the share of students in a subject-grade that a teacher instructs, which proxies for incentive strength. We find that achievement on incentivized exams, but not nonincentivized exams, improves when incentives strengthen. For the incentivized exams, we find that effects fade out monotonically as a teachers portion of the group increases to between 20 and 30 percentage and are larger for teachers with low-achieving students. Calculations based off these estimates show modest positive effects of the program overall.