EITM: Collaborative Research on Equilibrium Models of Competition in the Market for Higher Education: Theory and Evidence

这个项目研究了学院和大学如何利用他们的录取和财政援助政策来争夺学生。 这项研究将更好地了解大学在教学支出方面的差异。 它还将提供有关家庭收入、标准化考试成绩和学生群体种族构成的大学内部和大学之间差异的新信息。这项研究还将描述经济援助如何随标准化考试成绩、家庭收入、种族/民族和学生的其他特征而变化。研究人员还将评估大学、有色人种学生和白色学生在选择大学或做出录取决定时如何重视民族/种族多样性。 研究方法包括理论分析和并行计算和实证分析。研究方法将被采用，以允许大学和他们的未来学生之间的信息不对称，不对称有潜在的重要影响入学和财政援助政策。 这就产生了一个具有挑战性的统计问题，需要新的技术。 其他研究人员用来研究其他市场的标准方法并不是分析高等教育市场的好选择，原因有两个。 首先，产品特征是内生的，因为大学选择在教学上投入多少，也影响着学生的构成。 第二，由于特定学生类型的经济援助价格在不同的大学会有所不同，但只在所就读的大学观察到。 研究小组将开发新的统计技术来处理这些问题。研究将开发和估计高等教育的一般均衡模型，并使用该模型来研究公共政策问题。一般均衡框架对于研究可能改变所有高等教育机构的均衡财政援助和入学政策的政策问题尤为重要。该研究的主要贡献之一是在信息不对称的一般均衡框架下内生大学质量。由于所建立的大学目标函数不同于利润最大化，本研究丰富了非营利机构的理论和实证文献。这项研究还有助于理解同伴效应，阐明了同伴效应影响大学质量，招生决定和财政援助政策的方式，并通过发展经验证据的程度，观察到的录取和财政援助政策与模型的预测是一致的。研究中的另一个相关创新是在一般均衡框架中研究多样性的影响。最后，这个项目是在整合理论，计算和估计的前沿。本研究的关键公共政策要素是研究联邦财政援助政策的影响和研究公共资助的州立大学的作用。 这项研究考虑了平权行动政策对学生组成的影响。 该研究还调查了联邦财政援助政策对大学入学的影响，考虑到联邦援助政策和大学竞争导致大学自身资源提供的援助发生变化的方式。这项研究将有助于了解国家资助政策和公立大学的招生政策如何影响大学的入学和费用。因此，这项研究有希望为理解和量化公共政策对不同种族和社会经济群体的大学入学和大学费用的影响提供一个显着的进步。

This project studies how colleges and universities use their admission and financial aid policies to compete for students. The research will yield better information about how colleges vary in instructional expenditures. It will also give new information about variation within and across colleges in family incomes, standardized test scores, and the racial composition of their student bodies. Theresearch will also characterize how financial aid varies with standardized test scores, family incomes,race/ethnicity, and other characteristics of students. The researchers will also evaluate how colleges, students of color, and white students value ethnic/racial diversity in choosing a college or making admissions decisions. The research approach entails theoretical analysis and parallel computational and empirical analysis.The research methods will be adopted to allow for informational asymmetries between colleges and their prospective students, asymmetries that have potentially important implications for admission and financial aid policies. This creates a challenging statistical problem that will require new techniques. Standard approaches used by other researchers to study other markets are not a good choice for analyzing the market for higher education for two reasons. First, product characteristics are endogenous because colleges choose how much to spend on teaching and also influence the composition of their student bodies. Second, because of financial aid prices for a given student type will differ across colleges but are only observed at the college attended. The research team will develop new statistical techniques to deal with these problems.The research will develops and estimates a general equilibrium model of higher education and uses the model to study public policy issues. The general equilibrium framework is particularly important for study of policy issues that may change the equilibrium financial aid and admission policies of all institutions of higher education. Among the key contributions of the research is endogenizing college qualities in a general equilibrium framework with asymmetric information. Because the college objective function that is modeled and tested differs from profit maximization, this research adds to the theoretical and empirical literatures on nonprofit institutions. The research also contributes to understanding of peer effects by elucidating the way in which peer effects affect college qualities, admissions decisions, and financial aid policies, and by developing empirical evidence about the extent to which observed admission and financial aid policies are consistent with the model's predictions. A further, related innovation in the research is study of the effects of diversity in a general equilibrium framework. Finally, this project is on the frontier of integrating theory, computation, and estimation. Key public policy elements of this research are study of the effects of federal financial aid policies and study of the role of publicly funded state universities. The research considers the effect of affirmative action policies on student body composition. The research also investigates the effect of federal financial aid policies on college access, taking account of the way in which federal aid policies and college competition lead to changes in aid provided from colleges' own resources. The research will contribute to understanding how state funding policies and admissions policies of public universities affect access and costs of college. The research thus has the promise to provide a significant advance in understanding and quantifying the effects of public policy on college access and college costs for different racial and socio-economic groups.