“Can Free Community College Close Racial Disparities in Postsecondary Attainment? How Tulsa Achieves Affects Racially Minoritized Student Outcomes” by Dr. Elizabeth Bell

In her recent article, Dr. Bell examines Tulsa Achieves, a promise program that covers the balance of students’ tuition and fees after other aid is exhausted at a single community college. Utilizing a difference-in-differences and event-study design, we investigate the role Tulsa Achieves eligibility plays in promoting or hindering vertical transfer and bachelor’s degree attainment across racial/ethnic groups. We find that Tulsa Achieves eligibility is associated with increases in bachelor’s degree attainment within 5 years among Native American and Hispanic students and an increased likelihood of transfer within 4 years for Hispanic students.

“Using web data to improve surveillance for heat sensitive health outcomes” by Dr. Christopher Uejio

In his recent article, Dr. Uejio examines the relationship between heat-related web searches, social media messages, and heat-related health outcomes. Elevated and prolonged exposure to extreme heat is an important cause of excess summertime mortality and morbidity. To protect people from health threats, some governments are currently operating syndromic surveillance systems. However, A lack of resources to support time- and labor- intensive diagnostic and reporting processes make it difficult establishing region-specific surveillance systems. Big data created by social media and web search may improve upon the current syndromic surveillance systems by directly capturing people’s individual and subjective thoughts and feelings during heat waves.

“Dynamic financial contracting with persistent private information” by Dr. R. Vijay Krishna

In his recent article, Dr. Krishna studies a dynamic agency model where the agent privately observes the firm’s cash flows that are subject to persistent shocks. We characterize the policy dynamics and implement the optimal contract by financial securities. Because bad performance distorts investors’ beliefs downward, the agent has less incentive to misrepresent information. The agent’s compensation is less than what he can divert and is convex in performance. As private information becomes more persistent, (i) the agent is compensated more by stock options; (ii) firm credit limits vary more with history, dropping after bad performance; (iii) the firm is financially constrained for longer time.