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Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to research harms teaching and thus harms students' human capital accumulation. The economics literature has largely ignored the reasons for and desirability of this trend. We summarize, review, and extend existing economic theories of higher education to explain why incentives for unfunded research have increased. One theory is that researchers more effectively teach higher order skills and therefore increase student human capital more than non-researchers. In contrast, according to signaling theory, education is not intrinsically productive but only a signal that separates high- and low-ability workers. We extend this theory by hypothesizing that researchers make higher education more costly for low-ability students than do non-research faculty, achieving the separation more efficiently. We describe other theories, including research quality as a proxy for hard-to-measure teaching quality and barriers to entry. Virtually no evidence exists to test these theories or establish their relative magnitudes. Research is needed, particularly to address what employers seek from higher education graduates and to assess the validity of current measures of teaching quality.
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We develop and implement what we believe is the first conceptually valid health-inclusive poverty measure (HIPM)--a measure that includes health care or insurance in the poverty needs threshold and health insurance benefits in family resources--and we discuss its limitations. Building on the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, we construct a pilot HIPM for the under-65 population under ACA-like health reform in Massachusetts. This pilot is intended to demonstrate the practicality, face validity and value of a HIPM. Results suggest that public health insurance benefits and premium subsidies accounted for a substantial, one-third reduction in the poverty rate. Among low-income families who purchased individual insurance, premium subsidies reduced poverty by 9.4 percentage points.
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US Census Bureau poverty measures do not include an explicit need for health care or insurance nor do they consider health insurance benefits to be resources. Consequently, they cannot measure the direct impact of health insurance benefits on poverty. This paper reviews conceptual and practical considerations in incorporating health benefits and needs into poverty measures. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches including variants of the Official Poverty Measure (OPM); the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM); using a threshold with medical out-of-pocket (MOOP) expenditures; a Medical Care Expenditure Risk (MCER) Index; willingness to pay (WTP) for Medicaid; and the Health-Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM; Korenman and Remler 2016). We present estimates of Medicaid's impacts on child poverty, based on the HIPM. This paper was prepared as a background paper for the Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, of the Board of Children, Youth and Families of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper was submitted in October 2017 and embargoed until the release of the Committee's report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, in March of 2019.
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We compare student academic performance in traditional twice-a-week and compressed once-a-week lecture formats in introductory microeconomics between one semester in which students were randomly assigned into the formats and another semester when students were allowed to choose their format. In each semester we offered the same course with the sections taught at the same times in the same classrooms by the same professors using the same book, software and lecture slides. Our study design is modeled after a doubly randomized preference trial (DRPT), which provides insights regarding external validity beyond what is possible from a single randomized study. Our goal is to assess whether having a choice modifies the treatment effect of format. Students in the compressed format of the randomized arm of the study scored -0.19 standard deviations less on the combined midterm and final (p<.01) and -0.14 standard deviation less in choice arm (p<.01). There was little evidence of selection bias in choice of format. Future analyses of online learning formats employing randomization should consider DRPT designs to enhance the generalizability of results.
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