Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor Revisited

Abstract

In a recent paper in this Journal, Dynarski (2008) used data from the 1-percent 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files to demonstrate that merit scholarship programs in Georgia and Arkansas increased the stock of college-educated individuals in those states. This paper replicates the results in Dynarski (2008) but we also find important differences in the results between the 1-percent and 5-percent PUMS, especially for women. We also demonstrate that the author’s use of clustered standard errors, given the small number of clusters and only two policy changes, severely understates confidence intervals.