Luther Yap and Jessica Min will be presenting in person/via Zoom.
3rd year graduate students present for 30 minutes each.
“Valid t-ratio Inference for Overidentified Two Stage Least Squares,” Luther Yap
“Financial Shocks, Labor Market Opportunities, and High School Attendance: Evidence from the Great Depression” Jessica Min
Abstract
How do financial shocks impact human capital investment? Using the Great Depression as a laboratory in which family losses in savings and income often required children to drop out of school, I estimate how financially vulnerable parents transmitted this shock to their children. I leverage the independent responses of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks to compare individuals on different sides of a Fed border within the same state who likely faced similar local economic conditions but different degrees of credit contractions. I find children living in more hard-hit counties during the Depression in 1930 are on average 0.8 percentage points (2%) more likely to have graduated high school by 1940.