Matthew Wiswall
Biographic Data
| ID | 1162109 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Wiswall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Wiswall |
| SIGNATURE | WISWALL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Parenting with Patience
The impacts of same and opposite gender alumni speakers on interest in economics
This paper evaluates the impact of a series of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics. Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers in models which use untreated lectures as control groups, including professor and semester-year fixed effects and student-level covariates. Alumni speakers increase intermediate economics course take-up by 1.7–2.1…
Estimating the Technology of Children’s Skill Formation
In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor structure, we provide new identification results which illuminate the key identification trade-offs between restrictions on the skill production technology and the measurement relationships. One of our contr…
Inequality in Early Care Experienced by US Children
Using multiple datasets on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age six, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is high…
Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family
This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at all, would affect a wide array of future events, including future earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility…
Child Care and Child Care Policy
We analyze policies that support and affect the provision and costs of child care in the United States. These policies are motivated by at least three objectives: (1) improving the cognitive and social development of young children, (2) facilitating maternal employment, and (3) alleviating poverty. We summarize this policy landscape and the evidence on the effects they have on the development of children and parents. We provide a summary of the u…
Preference for the Workplace, Investment in Human Capital, and Gender
We use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes from a sample of high-ability undergraduates attending a highly selective university. We estimate that women on average have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for jobs with greater work flexibility and job stability, and men have a higher WTP for jobs with higher earnings growth. These job preferences relate to college major choices and to actual job choices…
Beyond Late with a Discrete Instrument
We show how a discrete instrument can be used to identify the marginal treatment effects under a functional structure that allows for treatment heterogeneity among individuals with the same observed characteristics and self-selection based on the unobserved gain from treatment. Guided by this identification result, we perform a marginal treatment effect analysis of the interaction between the quantity and quality of children. Our estimates reveal…
Preferences and Biases in Educational Choices and Labour Market Expectations
Using an experiment to measure overconfidence and preferences for competitiveness and risk, this article investigates whether these measures explain gender differences in college major choices and expected future earnings. We find that individuals who are overconfident and overly competitive expect to earn significantly more. In addition, gender differences in overconfidence and competitiveness explain 18% of the gender gap in earnings expectatio…
Transfers to Households with Children and Child Development
We utilise a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the efficacy of unrestricted, restricted, and conditional cash transfer (CCT) systems, and find that an optimally chosen CCT programme is the most cost‐efficient way to attain any given gain in average child quality. We explore s…
Determinants of College Major Choice
This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information, and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability. We estimate a ri…
Does Small High School Reform Lift Urban Districts? Evidence From New York City
Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York City’s small high school reform in which hundreds of new small high schools were built in less than a decade. We use rich individual student data on four coho…
Household Choices and Child Development
The growth in labour market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about its implications for child cognitive development. We estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household behaviour. The household makes labour supply decisions and provides time and money inputs into the child quality production process during the development period. Our empirical…
Do small schools improve performance in large, urban districts? Causal evidence from New York City
Preferences and Biases in Educational Choices and Labour Market Expectations
Using an experiment to measure overconfidence and preferences for competitiveness and risk, this article investigates whether these measures explain gender differences in college major choices and expected future earnings. We find that individuals who are overconfident and overly competitive expect to earn significantly more. In addition, gender differences in overconfidence and competitiveness explain 18% of the gender gap in earnings expectatio…
Transfers to Households with Children and Child Development
We utilise a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the efficacy of unrestricted, restricted, and conditional cash transfer (CCT) systems, and find that an optimally chosen CCT programme is the most cost‐efficient way to attain any given gain in average child quality. We explore s…
Beyond Late with a Discrete Instrument
We show how a discrete instrument can be used to identify the marginal treatment effects under a functional structure that allows for treatment heterogeneity among individuals with the same observed characteristics and self-selection based on the unobserved gain from treatment. Guided by this identification result, we perform a marginal treatment effect analysis of the interaction between the quantity and quality of children. Our estimates reveal…
Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family
This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at all, would affect a wide array of future events, including future earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility…
Inequality in Early Care Experienced by US Children
Using multiple datasets on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age six, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is high…
Do small schools improve performance in large, urban districts? Causal evidence from New York City
Child Care and Child Care Policy
We analyze policies that support and affect the provision and costs of child care in the United States. These policies are motivated by at least three objectives: (1) improving the cognitive and social development of young children, (2) facilitating maternal employment, and (3) alleviating poverty. We summarize this policy landscape and the evidence on the effects they have on the development of children and parents. We provide a summary of the u…
Does Small High School Reform Lift Urban Districts? Evidence From New York City
Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York City’s small high school reform in which hundreds of new small high schools were built in less than a decade. We use rich individual student data on four coho…
Do small schools improve performance in large, urban districts? Causal evidence from New York City
Household Choices and Child Development
The growth in labour market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about its implications for child cognitive development. We estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household behaviour. The household makes labour supply decisions and provides time and money inputs into the child quality production process during the development period. Our empirical…
Determinants of College Major Choice
This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information, and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability. We estimate a ri…
Does Small High School Reform Lift Urban Districts? Evidence From New York City
Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York City’s small high school reform in which hundreds of new small high schools were built in less than a decade. We use rich individual student data on four coho…
Transfers to Households with Children and Child Development
We utilise a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the efficacy of unrestricted, restricted, and conditional cash transfer (CCT) systems, and find that an optimally chosen CCT programme is the most cost‐efficient way to attain any given gain in average child quality. We explore s…
Beyond Late with a Discrete Instrument
We show how a discrete instrument can be used to identify the marginal treatment effects under a functional structure that allows for treatment heterogeneity among individuals with the same observed characteristics and self-selection based on the unobserved gain from treatment. Guided by this identification result, we perform a marginal treatment effect analysis of the interaction between the quantity and quality of children. Our estimates reveal…
Preferences and Biases in Educational Choices and Labour Market Expectations
Using an experiment to measure overconfidence and preferences for competitiveness and risk, this article investigates whether these measures explain gender differences in college major choices and expected future earnings. We find that individuals who are overconfident and overly competitive expect to earn significantly more. In addition, gender differences in overconfidence and competitiveness explain 18% of the gender gap in earnings expectatio…
Preference for the Workplace, Investment in Human Capital, and Gender
We use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes from a sample of high-ability undergraduates attending a highly selective university. We estimate that women on average have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for jobs with greater work flexibility and job stability, and men have a higher WTP for jobs with higher earnings growth. These job preferences relate to college major choices and to actual job choices…
Child Care and Child Care Policy
We analyze policies that support and affect the provision and costs of child care in the United States. These policies are motivated by at least three objectives: (1) improving the cognitive and social development of young children, (2) facilitating maternal employment, and (3) alleviating poverty. We summarize this policy landscape and the evidence on the effects they have on the development of children and parents. We provide a summary of the u…
Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family
This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at all, would affect a wide array of future events, including future earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility…
Inequality in Early Care Experienced by US Children
Using multiple datasets on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age six, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is high…
The impacts of same and opposite gender alumni speakers on interest in economics
This paper evaluates the impact of a series of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics. Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers in models which use untreated lectures as control groups, including professor and semester-year fixed effects and student-level covariates. Alumni speakers increase intermediate economics course take-up by 1.7–2.1…
Estimating the Technology of Children’s Skill Formation
In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor structure, we provide new identification results which illuminate the key identification trade-offs between restrictions on the skill production technology and the measurement relationships. One of our contr…
Parenting with Patience
Economics (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (9 works) · Economic growth (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Demographic economics (5 works) · Labour economics (5 works) · Microeconomics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Earnings (4 works)