NBER Publications by Alexander T. Whalley

In this paper we quantify the extent and magnitude of agglomeration spillovers from a formal institution whose sole mission is the creation and dissemination of knowledge -- the research university. We use the fact that universities follow a fixed endowment spending policy based on the market value of their endowments to identify the causal effect of the density of university activity on labor income in the non-education sector in large urban counties. Our instrument for university expenditures is based on the interaction between each university's initial endowment level at the start of the study period and the variation in stock market shocks over the course of the study period. We find modest but statistically significant spillover effects of university activity. The estimates indicate ...

This paper investigates whether and how college quality rankings affect a key factor in the ranks measure of quality -- financial resources per student -- for public colleges. We show that when a public college is exogenously included in the U.S. News & World Report rankings educational and general expenditure per student increase by 3.2%. To fund the additional expenditure, state appropriations per student increase by 3.4 to 6.8%, while tuition is not responsive at all.

The state appropriation response may be realized in two potential channels: on the one hand, U.S. News rankings may allocate additional citizen attention to the issue of public college quality, and the increased attention steers more funding towards public colleges. On the other hand, college rankings may ...