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

这个项目研究高校如何利用他们的招生和资助政策来竞争学生。这项研究将提供更好的信息，了解大学在教学支出方面的差异。它还将提供有关大学内部和大学之间家庭收入、标准化考试成绩和学生群体种族构成差异的新信息。这项研究还将研究经济援助如何随着标准化考试成绩、家庭收入、种族/民族以及学生的其他特征而变化。研究人员还将评估大学、有色人种学生和白人学生在选择大学或做出招生决定时如何重视种族/种族多样性。研究方法包括理论分析、并行计算和实证分析。研究方法将考虑到大学与其潜在学生之间的信息不对称，这种不对称对招生和资助政策具有潜在的重要影响。这造成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，因为大学可以选择花在教学上的钱，也会影响学生的构成。其次，由于经济资助的原因，不同类型的学生的价格会有所不同，但只在所在的大学遵守。研究团队将开发新的统计技术来处理这些问题。该研究将开发和估计一个高等教育的一般均衡模型，并将该模型用于研究公共政策问题。一般均衡框架对于研究可能改变所有高等教育机构均衡资助和入学政策的政策问题特别重要。这项研究的关键贡献之一是在一个信息不对称的一般均衡框架中内生大学质量。由于模拟和检验的高校目标函数不同于利润最大化，本研究补充了关于非营利机构的理论和实证文献。这项研究还通过阐明同伴效应影响大学质量、招生决定和资助政策的方式，以及通过发展关于观察到的招生和资助政策与模型预测的一致性程度的经验证据，来帮助理解同伴效应。此外，研究中的一个相关创新是在一般均衡框架下研究多样性的影响。最后，该项目处于集成理论、计算和评估的前沿。这项研究的关键公共政策要素是研究联邦财政援助政策的效果和研究公共资助州立大学的作用。本研究考虑了平权行动政策对学生身体成分的影响。这项研究还调查了联邦资助政策对大学入学的影响，考虑到联邦资助政策和大学竞争导致大学自有资源提供的援助发生变化的方式。这项研究将有助于理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，这项研究有望在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方面取得重大进展。

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.