Estimating the Short-Run Supply Curve of Higher Education

• Main Authors: Davis, Carter, Nadauld, Taylor
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2015
• Subjects: short-run supply curve; higher education; real estate; financial crisis; Finance and Financial Management; Orca
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2015/iss1/173; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/context/jur/article/2239/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

The original project that I set out to research with this ORCA grant was to investigate how the real estate bubble spread leading up to the financial crisis, using an incredible 90 gigabyte dataset of mortgage information. Two unfortunate events occurred during the course of this project: the external hard drive that stored the data was lost and a programming error on my part destroyed the data on the BYU supercomputer. Dr. Nadauld and I were devastated. Instead of investigating how bubbles spread, I set out to estimate the slope of the supply curve of higher education. Dr. Nadauld and I have been working for the past year to analyze how federal loan and grant policies affect the cost of higher education. Estimating the slope of the supply curve of higher education is both relevant to our current research and has important policy implications. I did this project with three BYU students: Joseph Cooprider, Michael Gmeiner, and Nick Hales.