Johnathan G. Conzelmann

Moral hazard arguments suggest that Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans for student loans weaken work incentives by lowering the return to earnings. I test this in the United States (US) context using two cohorts of federal student loan borrowers and find the opposite — the 2009 IBR expansion increased employment probability by 2.1 percentage points, with effects concentrated among lower-achieving, default-risk borrowers consistent with IDR operating as insurance against non-payment. Contrary to moral hazard predictions, hours worked and wages did not decline on average, a result I attribute to the absence of salient income thresholds in US IDR design.

This paper identifies a decades-long trend in 4-year postsecondary education in the United States — the production of bachelor's degrees has diversified significantly and consistently by field of study. I document this pattern in multiple data sources and show that secular within-college expansion of majors drives this trend. Peer institution effects, or colleges' tendency to identify with and aspire to other colleges, offers the most consistent explanation for the market's collective accommodation of increasing demand for a bachelor's degree since 1990.

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon.

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. In one application, we quantify the extent of "brain drain" across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

Federal earnings-based college accountability metrics typically benchmark graduates against the labor market of the state where the college is located. But graduates often move to places with very different cost of living, undermining many state-based comparisons.

Where does a state's college-educated workforce actually come from? Two-thirds of college-educated workers still live in the state where they attended high school, and most of that talent is homegrown — schooled and employed without ever crossing a state line. Retention varies sharply across states, and one of the strongest predictors is how many of a state's own residents enroll as first-year students in its colleges, underscoring the role of public institutions as anchors for state talent pools.