Research

U.S. universities often adjust operations sharply in response to financial shocks. Yet this practice may be costly when shocks affect peer institutions: contraction by peers reduces competition for key inputs, creating favorable conditions to expand rather than contract. I study whether universities could improve outcomes by smoothing faculty hiring over time. I first show that hiring responds to endowment revenue shocks. I then build models of faculty hiring and characterize the identified set of gains from adopting counterfactual, shock-independent hiring schemes. Applying my models to two decades of hiring data at top sociology departments, I find little evidence that alternative hiring schemes improve hire quality.

We study how grading regimes shape employers’ interpretation of academic credentials. We first assign math test takers to receive inflated, compressed, or standard grading distributions while holding underlying test performance constant. In an incentivized online experiment, participants acting as hiring managers observe letter grades in a randomly assigned regime and set wages to maximize payoffs based on inferred test scores and underlying ability. %We use these data to estimate how managers weight priors versus grade signals. Consistent with theory, coarser grading leads managers to place less weight on the signal. However, grade inflation raises inferred average test performance and ability, indicating an upward shift in beliefs even as precision declines. More broadly, signal coarsening reduces selection efficiency and increases reliance on priors, which can exacerbate inequities. In particular, among participants who believe men have higher math ability, the gender wage gap widens.

Recent literature increasingly observes negative effects of trade and import exposure on local labor markets in the U.S., but it remains unclear how local labor force adapts to trade shocks in the long run. I investigate the human capital response in U.S. local labor markets to increased Chinese import exposure from 1990 to 2007. Using administrative post-secondary enrollment data and an instrumental variable approach, I find insignificant university enrollment changes in response to Chinese import shocks. The null result holds when restricting my analysis to community colleges, contrary to prior literature. However, I observe significant yet small increases in public university enrollment due to Chinese import exposure. Overall, these findings suggest that the spontaneous human capital response to import competition is negligible.