Admission Groups and Academic Performance: A Study of Marginal Entrants in the Selection to Higher Education

The purpose of this paper is to study whether Swedish admission policies successful in selecting the best-performing students. The Swedish universities select students based on two different instruments, which each form a separate admission group. A regression model is recommended to estimate the achievement differences for the marginally accepted students between the admission groups and is applied to a sample of 9024 Swedish university entrants in four different fields of education. Marginally accepted students in the group selected by school grades on average perform better than students accepted by an admission test, suggesting that a small reallocation of study positions towards the grade admission group may increase overall academic achievement. However, the achievement difference appears to vary concerning university programme selectivity. We found that increasing selection by grades in less competitive programmes would improve overall achievement, while we do not find any effect for highly competitive programmes.

Social Efficiency of Entry in an Open Economy

We show that cost asymmetry between the domestic and foreign firms is not necessary for the occurrence of insufficient entry in the domestic country. This result provides a rationale for pro-competitive domestic policies even in the absence of cost asymmetries among the domestic and foreign firms. However, if significant demand comes from foreign countries, and the market structures are determined endogenously in the domestic and foreign countries, domestic-entry in an open economy might not be insufficient, implying that foreign competition might not reduce the importance of anti-competitive domestic policies.

Does Immigration Depreciate Residential Land Prices? Case of Tokyo

This study investigates the effects of immigration on residential land prices in urban Tokyo. A rapid increase in immigrants in Tokyo raises the concern that immigration may depreciate land prices because of the negative image emerging from the perception that some immigrants might create disharmony in society. However, our analysis denies this possibility; for every 1% increase in immigrant ratio (i.e., the proportion of immigrants in the total population), the residential land prices increase by 12%. Although the literature explains that a negative immigration effect occurs when the analysis uses small geographic units, the results suggest that even a positive effect can occur under small geographic units. The implications of the current results are complicated. While the concern of immigration-induced land price depreciation is unfounded, this raises another concern—that of asset inequality between land owners and tenants.

Recreational Marijuana Sales Legalization and Monday Work Injury Claims

An important stylized fact in the literature is that more Workers’ Compensation claims for difficult-to-diagnose injuries are filed on Monday than on any other day of the week. This paper studies the impact of recreational marijuana sales legalization on Monday work injury claims. Using restricted-use Workers’ Compensation claim data in Oregon and a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model, I find the probability of overall Monday injuries increase by 4 percentage points after recreational marijuana sales legalization. The event study graphs suggest the medium-term effects appear to equal the short-term effects. Additionally, I do not find strong evidence to support those difficult-to-diagnose Monday injuries disproportionately increase after recreational marijuana sales legalization, suggesting a limited moral hazard of Monday injury claiming behavior after recreational marijuana sales legalization.

The Impact of Mask Usage on COVID-19 Deaths: Evidence from US Counties Using a Quasi-Experimental Approach

I examine the relationship between mask usage and COVID-19 deaths at the county level. When examining this relationship, even the direction caused by the potential endogeneity bias is unclear. In one direction, characteristics that are known to correlate with a larger amount of potential COVID-19 deaths, such as an older population, may make people more likely to wear masks. This will cause a bias that makes mask usage look less effective than it truly is. In the other direction, areas with higher risk tolerances may have less mask usage, but may at the same time be engaging in other behavior that puts them at higher risk for contracting COVID-19. This will cause a bias that makes mask usage look more effective than it truly is. The identification approach exploits a large set of controls and employs percentage of vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election as an instrumental variable for mask usage. The main finding is that a one percentage point increase in the number of individuals who say they often or frequently wear a mask when within six feet of people will reduce COVID-19 deaths in a county by 10.5%, or six deaths in the average county.

College Readiness, Early Post-secondary Academic Performance and the GED Degree: Evidence from Kentucky

We use detailed administrative data from Kentucky to provide robust descriptive evidence on the relationship between the General Educational Development (GED) degree, college readiness, and early post-secondary (PSE) academic performance. Following previous work in this area, we address selection issues by focusing on a sample of students who are identified as at-risk prior to high school entry. Our results suggest the GED credential is not a credible signal of PSE readiness, particularly in mathematics. GED graduates attain a lower first semester GPA and are also less likely to re-enroll in second semester courses. We also find that changes made to the GED exam in 2014 to enhance student readiness in PSE institutions did not yield meaningful improvements. Finally, we investigate the extent to which differences in math coursework can explain estimated GED-related math readiness gaps, finding coursework to account for about for about 40 percent of the observed gap.

Monetary and Non-Monetary Poverty within Urban Locals and Rural Migrants in China using Inequality-Sensitive Poverty Measures

This paper measures monetary and non-monetary poverty among urban local and rural migrant groups in the urban labour market in China, capturing incidence, intensity and inequality of poverty. To measure non-monetary poverty in multiple dimensions the chosen indicators are education, health status, health insurance and pension insurance. Using data from the China Household Income Project for the years 2002, 2007, and 2013, it appears that although monetary poverty in both groups is low, migrants have higher levels of non-monetary deprivation for various levels of poverty thresholds. Compared to the urban locals, the rural migrants experienced relatively less severe poverty than mild or moderate poverty during 2002 and 2007. Our Shapley decomposition exercise on non-monetary poverty measure reveals that the incidence contributes most to the urban-migrant gap, and the contribution of intensity is higher than that of inequality. The most important factors in multidimensional poverty for both groups are health insurance and pension insurance in all years. Our logit analysis shows that the effects of demographic characteristics, level of contract, occupation, and the industry have different impacts on these two groups.

Birthplace Favoritism and Quality of Education

We investigated the long-term effects of birthplace favoritism by top-ranking politicians on the quality of education in Vietnam. We used over 1 million test scores from the 2009 and 2014 Vietnamese national university entrance examinations. We examined both the different timing of political terms and the total years of birthplace favoritism. Using the school fixed effects, we found that birthplace favoritism did not have any significant impacts, regardless of the timing and duration of such favoritism. We did not find evidence for such impacts in the distribution of test scores either. The results also suggest that national entrance examinations were unaffected by birthplace favoritism up to 2014.

Medicaid, Earnings, and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

The Medicaid and labor supply empirical literature offers competing conclusions of zero effects and significant reductions in earnings. However, zero effects are only theoretically consistent with the earnings distribution’s extremes. Medicaid participants with positive pre-treatment labor supply should unequivocally decrease earnings. This paper clarifies the literature’s ambiguity by combining quantile regression with data from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. The distributional impacts imply that zero effects are not universally representative of Medicaid households. The annual earnings impact of Medicaid participation ranges between increases of $1400 to deceases of $3120 for single adults. Pre-existing mental illness or health constraints on work account for counterintuitive positive earnings impacts. By demonstrating that sample compositional differences determine whether Medicaid’s labor supply impact is zero or negative, this paper offers a reconciliation to the range of existing estimates in the empirical literature.

Costs of Sales Forces, Substitution between Competing Products, and Vertical Integration Decisions

This paper analyzes duopolistic firms’ vertical integration decisions with considering costs of sales forces and sales delegation under vertical integration. The main contribution of our research is showing that full vertical integration (separation) is more common when competing products are highly (weakly) substitutable. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, an asymmetric vertical structure may not only be an equilibrium outcome but may also be optimal for consumers’ surplus in spite of yielding higher retail prices than those arising under full vertical integration. We also examine the impacts of vertical structures on welfare which have vertical merger policy relevance. First, when products are weakly substitutable, keeping vertical merger costs low may induce full vertical integration to be an equilibrium outcome which optimizes consumers’ surplus and social welfare simultaneously. Second, imposing a vertical merger tax increasing with substitution between products on firms may induce firms’ vertical integration decisions to be optimal for social welfare.