| I examine how academic performance in college affects labor market outcomes, how the costs of college affect selection into higher education, and finally how experience searching for jobs affects unemployment duration. In the first chapter, I find that the return to earning a higher GPA in college is positive and fairly large: a one point increase in GPA on a four point scale is associated with a 10% increase in earnings ten years after graduating college. I argue that the results suggest that most of this return is due to sorting and the higher likelihood of high achieving students going to graduate school. In the second chapter, exploiting the elimination of the Social Security Student Benefit Program, I test for heterogeneity in the price elasticity of college with respect to AFQT scores, family income, parent education, race and gender. I find that students with lower AFQT scores and less educated parents are more price elastic than their peers with higher AFQT scores and more highly educated parents. Finally, in the third chapter I examine how experience searching for jobs affects unemployment duration. I find that search while unemployed is associated with longer non-employment durations and search while employed is associated with shorter non-employment duration. These results can be explained within a search framework, but ultimately it is difficult to reject that unobserved heterogeneity is driving the results. |
