Alex Solis

Bio: Alex Solis is an academic researcher from Uppsala University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Loan & Regression discontinuity design. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 23 publications receiving 279 citations. Previous affiliations of Alex Solis include Catholic University of the Most Holy Conception & University of California, Berkeley.

Credit Access and College Enrollment

Abstract: Does access to credit explain the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question based on the causal effects of two ...

Returns to Elite Higher Education in the Marriage Market: Evidence from Chile

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the marriage market returns to being admitted to a higher ranked (i.e. more 'elite') university by exploiting unique features of the Chilean university admission system. This system centrally allocates applicants based on their university entrance test score, which allows us to identify causal effects by using a regression discontinuity approach. Moreover, the Chilean context provides us with the necessary data on the long run outcome 'partner quality.'We find that being admitted to a higher ranked university has substantial returns in terms of partner quality for women, while estimates for men are about half the size and not significantly different from zero.

Does Higher Education Cause Political Participation? : Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

Abstract: Education has been considered by political economy and political science literature one of the most important factors explaining political participation: voter turnout, civic engagement, political ...

Patterns of Pass-through of Commodity Price Shocks to Retail Prices

Abstract: Commodity prices have been rising at unprecedented rates over the last two years. The primary objective of this paper is to assess if and how firms pass through upstream cost increases to final good prices. First, we investigate what happens to the shelf prices (the regular prices) of goods that contain significant amounts of a commodity whose price has changed. The objective is to document patterns of price rigidity depending on the share of the commodity in the final good that is sold to consumers. For example, given an abnormal commodity price change in wheat, what happens to the shelf regular price of bread, wheat cereals, and other goods that contain wheat? Commodity pass-through patterns for ready to eat cereal (smallest share of commodity in final product) and fresh chicken (largest share of commodity in final good) are investigated. Second, we also assess what happens to the net prices consumers pay (that is the regular price net of discounts offered). One possible way to pass through a cost increase is to reduce the frequency of promotional discounts, or offer smaller discounts to consumers. Upstream commodity input prices used in our investigation are wheat and corn futures prices, to account for upstream inputs, and flour and chicken feed producer price sub indices for downstream cost shocks. We combine several datasets for this empirical analysis: commodity prices, commodity price indices, and scanner data on prices for a variety of goods, over a four year time period and across several stores in California, belonging to a large retail chain. We construct quantity weighted price indices within two product categories sold in the supermarket, where prices are weighted by pre-determined quantity weights to obtain shelf price indices and net price indices. For each of the commodities, regressions will be run using store-level product (UPC) weekly data. The reduced form regressions consist of projecting the shelf price index, as well as the net price index, on commodity prices, other explanatory variables and on region and time dummies. The point estimates measure the effect of residual changes in commodity prices, net of seasonal and regional effects, on the prices consumers face when making purchase decisions. We also construct a variable that measures the frequency of price discounts and relate that variable to the same explanatory variables. We estimate pass through behavior using the above three different measures of retail price activity controlling for cost proxies, store-level fixed-effects and regional time trends using panel data estimation techniques. Results suggest that an important part of retail price variation comes from promotional activities, and the usual shelf price index would underestimate the true pass through coefficient. To deal with omitted variables and price stickiness we included a lagged dependent variable, using the Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimator. For Chicken the results show that using standard information on regular shelf price leads to an underestimation of the true pass-through coefficient. For Cereal, using standard shelf prices leads to an overestimation of the pass-through coefficient reflecting the importance of storability faced by consumers and retailers, and industry characteristics in the sale dynamics. Not only do our cost pass-through estimates account for sales we also provide dynamic multipliers for grain commodity price increases to supermarket shelf prices. The estimated dynamic elasticities are not as small as one might expect from a naive model. The elasticity of cereal price with respect to flour is over 1 and the elasticity of chicken price with respect to chicken feed was 30 percent. These estimates would imply a very large price increase in cereal and chicken over the last several years. There are fewer sales when commodity prices go up. From this we would conclude that net prices should be used for pass-through analysis.

Returns to Elite Higher Education in the Marriage Market: Evidence from Chile

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the marriage market returns to being admitted to a higher ranked (i.e. more ”elite”) university by exploiting unique features of the Chilean university admission system.This system centrally allocates applicants based on their university entrance test score, which allows us to identify causal effects by using a regression discontinuity approach. Moreover, the Chilean context provides us with the necessary data on the long run outcome ‘partner quality’. We find that being admitted to a higher ranked university has substantial returns in terms of partner quality for women, while estimates for men are about half the size and not significantly different from zero. JEL-Classification: I23, I24, J12. Keywords: Returns to education quality, higher education, marriage market, regression discontinuity, Chile.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

Education at a Glance

Abstract: A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

Field of Study, Earnings, and Self-Selection*

Abstract: Why do individuals choose different types of post-secondary education, and what are the labor market consequences of those choices? We show that answering these questions is difficult because individuals choose between several unordered alternatives. Even with a valid instrument for every type of education, instrumental variables estimation of the payoffs require information about individuals' ranking of education types or strong additional assumptions, like constant effects or restrictive preferences. These identification results motivate and guide our empirical analysis of the choice of and payoff to field of study. Our context is Norway's post-secondary education system where a centralized admission process covers almost all universities and colleges. This process creates credible instruments from discontinuities which effectively randomize applicants near unpredictable admission cutoffs into different fields of study. At the same time, it provides us with strategy-proof measures of individuals' ranking of fields. Taken together, this allows us to estimate the payoffs to different fields while correcting for selection bias and keeping the next-best alternatives as measured at the time of application fixed. We find that different fields have widely different payoffs, even after accounting for institutional differences and quality of peer groups. For many fields the payoffs rival the college wage premiums, suggesting the choice of field is potentially as important as the decision to enroll in college. The estimated payoffs are consistent with individuals choosing fields in which they have comparative advantage. We also test and reject assumptions of constant effects or restrictive preferences, suggesting that information on next-best alternatives is essential to identify payoffs to field of study.