Christopher Jepsen and Mark Montgomery
Journal of Urban Economics, January 2009
The substantial literature on access to higher eduction hasa narrow focus: the effect of tuition on the enrollment decisions of 18-year-olds seeking bachelors degrees. But for non-traditional (i.e. older) students who tend to prefer community college, access is more about a school's location than about its tuition and fees. Using data on over 150,000 mature workers (aged 25 to 49) in the Greater Baltimore area, we analyze the impact of travel distance on community college enrollment decisions. We find that distance is a highly statistically significant factor in deciding whether to enroll in community college, and in which school to choose. Simulations of the model suggest that if the typical resident had to travel three additional miles from home to the nearest college, enrollment could drop by as much as 14%.
Mark Montgomery and Katharine Anderson
Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, February 2007
Evidence suggests that while women are more likely to go to college than men, they are less likely to go to graduate school. Moreover, in fields like science and engineering, women who do pursue advanced degrees are less likely than men to complete them. This paper compares MBA completion rates for women and men who registered to take the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). We find that female test registrants are about 30% less likely than men to complete the MBA. This difference in completion rates seems only partly due to gender disparity in family responsibilities.
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Mark Montgomery and Irene Powell
Journal of Education for Business, March/April 2006
This study uses multivariate statistical analysis to examine the impact cost on the likelihood a person will enroll in and complete, respectively, an MBA program. It considers both the explicit cost of paying tuition and the implicit cost, or opportunity cost, of earnings foregone while in school. Results suggest that tuition is not a major impediment either to pursuing or to completing an MBA. High opportunity cost, however, tends to reduce enrollment and degree completion.
Mark Montgomery, Terry Johnson and Sayed Faisal
Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, February 2005
Studies of self-employment disagree on the relative importance of human and financial capital in starting a business and keeping it open. This paper uses data from the Washington Self-Employment and Enterprise Development Demonstration (SEED) to model the decision to start a business jointly with the probability that the business will succeed. We find that when start-up and survival are modeled simultaneously, human capital appears to increase the probability of pursuing self-employment, but not the probability of succeeding at it. Financial capital, on the other hand, seems to makes it easier to both start a business and to keep it going. These results shed significant light on an important policy debate: do financial markets provide too little capital to small-business start-ups?
Mark Montgomery and Irene Powell
Industrial Relations, July 2003
Economists have argued that employers discriminate among prospective hirees on the basis of signals such as race, sex, or education levels. To what extent can a “positive” signal like higher education counteract a “negative” one like being female or a minority member? This paper tests the hypothesis that a woman with an MBA will face less discrimination than a woman without one. Using a new longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test, we compare the gender wage gap among MBA recipients with the gap among non-recipients. The GMAT registrant
survey makes this comparison feasible by providing good measures of normally unobservable personal attributes like ability, quality of education, and attitudes toward career and family. We find evidence that women with an MBA suffer less discrimination than they would without the degree.
Mark Montgomery
Economics of Education Review, October 2002
Less than a handful of papers have used data on individuals to examine people's decisions about which school to attend. This paper develops a nested logit model of the determinants of choice of a graduate business school. Data are drawn from a new longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test. One finding is that elasticity of school choice with respect to tuition is fairly low, about 0.08. Another is that, even after controlling for the effects of Affirmative Action in admissions, blacks and Hispanics are substantially more attracted to top-tier institutions, while women are less attracted to them.