Some Ideas for Dissertation Projects¶

This page contains a collection of ideas that may be useful for getting started on dissertation research. Talk to me if any of these sound interesting.

Disclaimer: I haven't thought about these ideas carefully, so they may not be good ideas. Or they may have been done (note the date next to each idea). Or they may not be doable. Or boring, or fundamentally mistaken, or any of the other things that tend to derail research projects.

Don't take the ideas as given. Use them to get started thinking about a set of questions.

Some general tips for getting started with a dissertation are here.

Human Capital¶

Why did schooling stop rising in 1950? (10/08)¶

U.S. educational attainment rose smoothly from at least 1900 to 1950. Then it stopped rising. Why? And why did schooling rise in the first place (some recent papers offer answers, but do I believe them?)?

The Ag/Non-Ag or Urban-Rural Wage Gap ## (2015-05)¶

Wages in non-ag are double those in ag. Wages in cities are higher than in villages (by how much?).

Some papers suggest reasons. For example, Lagakos and Waugh (2013 AER) argue that selection is important. But nobody seems to use much data to study these questions.

To me, this calls for panel data. One could observe the wage changes as a given person migrates from ag to non-ag.

Taxation with risky human capital (6/01)¶

A large literature studies how human capital responds to taxation. Almost all of this literature abstracts from most uncertainty (about earnings etc.). It seems obvious that this abstraction should lead to overstated tax effects (use the intuition from portfolio choice). It would be useful to quantify how large that bias is. This would require embedding realistic earnings uncertainty into a standard life-cycle model with schooling and job-training. It would also be nice to have some analytical results about the effect of uncertainty on tax elasticities in simpler models.

A word of caution: There are a couple of papers looking at human capital under uncertainty, though it seems nobody has looked at this particular question. This needs to be checked, though.

Why is schooling lumpy? (12/07)¶

In virtually all theories of human capital, years of schooling are a continuous choice. In the data, the choice is lumpy (high school graduate or dropout).

Why is schooling lumpy? Why is there a big (presumably permanent) earnings penalty for dropping out of college after 3 years with a good GPA? What can be learned about how human capital is produced and valued in the market?

Does this have to do with the fact that grades are a noisy signal of ability? Why is grade completion a better signal?