Welcome!
I am a recent Ph.D. Graduate in Economics at the University of Chicago. I’m an applied microeconomist working on topics in labor economics, public economics, and the economics of education. I also have a strong methodological interest in applied econometrics.
I will join the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as a Research Economist in Fall 2024.
Here is my CV. Email: mgalperin@uchicago.edu
Working Papers
Who Benefits from College Grant Aid and Why? Evidence from Texas [pdf]
Abstract: I use rich administrative data and several quasi-experiments in Texas to study which students benefit most from college grant aid and why. For “extensive-margin” students, grant aid causes enrollment in college, and therefore has potentially large benefits relative to these students’ no-college counterfactual. In contrast, “intensive-margin” students would attend college even in the absence of additional aid, but nevertheless may benefit from additional financial support. The goal of this paper is to compare the costs and benefits of aid targeted at different groups of students and college sectors, and to understand the contributions of the intensive and extensive margins in shaping aid’s overall effects. To do so, I leverage discontinuities in grant award rules which create variation in aid targeting three distinct populations: middle-income applicants to four-year colleges, low-income applicants to four-year colleges, and low-income applicants to community colleges. While these discontinuities provide exogenous variation in grant awards, I still encounter a common missing-data problem: my data contains all enrolled students, not all applicants, meaning that discontinuities in outcomes at the eligibility cutoff may conflate the causal effects of grants with compositional changes in enrolled students. I develop a bounding approach to overcome sample selection bias stemming from this missing-data problem. I find that grant aid targeted at low-income applicants to four-year colleges has large impacts on academic outcomes and students’ future earnings. In sharp contrast, there is little, if any, effect of additional aid on academic outcomes and future earnings among middle-income applicants to four-year colleges and low-income applicants to community colleges. Across all three treatment margins, extensive-margin effects do not play a large positive role in determining the overall effects of grant aid.
Work in Progress
Mandatory Wage-Posting and Worker Job Mobility (with Haruka Uchida and Oscar Volpe)
Abstract: Mandatory Wage-Posting Laws (MWPLs) require employers to publicly disclose salary ranges for new job vacancies, providing incumbent workers with more accurate information about their potential outside options. Using administrative data from a large payroll company, we study the impact of several recent mandatory wage-posting laws — in California, Colorado, Washington, and New York City — on workers’ job tenure and turnover. We investigate whether workers who are revealed by these policies to be underpaid to similar workers in their local labor market become more likely to separate from their current jobs. Using rich data on workplace amenities, we further explore how non-wage compensation mediates these effects. While the literature has primarily examined the impacts of pay transparency through its effect on workers’ bargaining relationships with their existing employers, we study whether broad-based implementations of pay transparency also affect workers’ employment decisions by reducing information frictions about outside options.
Workplace Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from Brazil (with Yixin Sun)