Housing Booms and Busts, Labor Market Opportunities, and College Attendance

By K. K. Charles, Erik Hurst, Matthew J. Notowidigdo. The American Economic Review, 2018

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study how the recent housing boom and bust affected college enrollment during the 2000s. We exploit cross-city variation in local housing booms, which improved labor market opportunities for young men and women. We find that the boom lowered college enrollment, with effects concentrated at two-year colleges. The decline in enrollment during the boom was generally reversed during the bust; however, attainment remains persistently low for particular cohorts, suggesting that reduced educational attainment is an enduring effect of the recent housing cycle. The housing boom can account for approximately 25 percent of the recent slowdown in college attainment. (JEL I23, I25, J24, J31, R21, R31)

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08b3cbb15fdfa59a0647904cc4ad43026ddabf80

Citations in the corpus

• A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory (2018, unknown): “The Baily-Chetty replacement rate solves the trade-off between the need for insurance, measured by 1/U′( c e ) − 1/U′( c u ) , and the need for incentives to search, measured by ε m , as in the work of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006). The correction term is the product of the effect of UI on tightnes”
• Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change (2020, unknown): “Changes in the return to education from aggregate economic shocks have recently been found to be a pivotal factor in schooling choices in other settings, from trade shocks in Mexico and around the world (Atkin 2016; Blanchard and Olney 2017), to the housing price bubble in the United States (Charles”