The importance of financial resources for student loan repayment: evidence from Canada
Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show that nearly all recent borrowers with annual incomes above $40,000 make their standard loan payments...
There is no student loan problem
Don Heller nails it in this Washington Post op-ed, my favorite quote:
It is not uncommon to read stories about college students who say, “I woke up one day and realized I had $50,000 in outstanding student loans and had no idea how I got there.” And yet nobody would accept at face value someone stating, “I woke up one day driving a Mercedes and had no idea how I was $50,000 in debt.”
Is college for everyone?
There seem to be more people questioning whether we should be pushing the completion agenda as much as we are. A blog post from the NY Times has some responses from parents whose kids are not taking the traditional route after college. This doesn’t sound good: Anxiety abounds for some parents of students who feel compelled to follow the path their friends are taking. “My stepdaughter is...
Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution
We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the papal schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks...
The quest for randomness
One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons features a lizardlike creature that’s billed as a “random number generator,” but that only ever seems to spit out the number nine. Dilbert asks his guide, “Are you sure that’s random?” The guide replies, “That’s the problem with randomness. You can never be sure.” It’s funny (at least to me), but is it true? Can you ever be reasonably sure that something is...
Urine field experiments
, via this article on bathroom behavior in the Atlantic.
How to give a good presentation
Via Tyler Cowen’s blog. The focus is on applied microeconomics, but very useful for anyone doing applied quant work in the social sciences:
Power analyses for matching
A colleague at RTI asked me about power analyses for PSM, specifically, should he assume dependent samples for his power analysis? Recall that with dependent samples, we pair observations at the analysis stage. For example, we might calculate the change over time for two observations of the same individual, or compare husbands’ and wives’ perception of their marriages. With matching...
In defense of the SAT
Takes on popular myths that the SAT does not predict college success, is only driven by socio-economic status, etc.:
Yes, IQ Really Matters