STEPHANIE CHAPMAN
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Placement Director:
Professor Matthias Doepke
Placement Administrator: Mercedes Thomas
847-491-8207
847-491-5694
doepke@northwestern.edu
econphd@northwestern.edu
CONTACT INFORMATION
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Mobile: 678-614-6485
slchapman@u.northwestern.edu
http://sites.northwestern.edu/slc890
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Citizenship: United States
RESEARCH AND TEACHING FIELDS
Research:
Teaching:
Labor, Education
Development, Labor, Education, Macro Labor
DOCTORAL STUDIES
Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
Dissertation: Essays in Labor Economics
Committee Chairperson: Professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach
Date of Completion: July 2016 (expected)
PREDOCTORAL STUDIES
M.A.: Economics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 2011
B.A.: Economics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 2011
B.S.: Mathematics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 2011
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
Washington Center for Economic Growth Dissertation Grant,
“Student Loans and the Labor Market,” 2015-2016 [$15,000]
Susan Schmidt Bies Prize for Student Research in Economics and Public Policy,
“Long Run Outcomes of Child Labor,” 2014 [$1,000]
Graduate Scholarship, Northwestern University, 2011-12
Foundation Fellowship, University of Georgia, 2007-11
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Mentored Discussions in Teaching, CIRTL, Northwestern University (2015)
Teaching Assistant, Northwestern University, 2012-2015
MMSS 211-1: Intermediate Microeconomics [Math intensive] (2012, 2013)
MMSS 211-2: Introduction to Game Theory [Math intensive] (2014)
MMSS 211-3: Formal Models in Political Science [Math intensive] (2013, 2014, 2015)
Teaching Assistant, University of Georgia, 2011
Stephanie Chapman, Page 2
ECON 2105: Principles of Macroeconomics (2011)
ECON 2106: Principles of Microeconomics (2011)
Grader, University of Georgia, 2008-09
MATH 3500H, MATH 3510H: Honors Multivariable Mathematics I & II (2008-2009)
RESEARCH AND WORK EXPERIENCE
Research Assistant to Professor Quincy Thomas Stewart, Institute for Policy Research,
Northwestern University, 2014-15
Research Assistant to Professor Jonathan Williams, University of Georgia, 2011
JOB MARKET PAPER
“Student Loans and the Labor Market: Evidence from Merit Aid Scholarships”
Student loans are a growing part of the college funding equation in the US, while at the same time
merit aid scholarship programs have become an increasingly popular avenue for states to
subsidize higher education. I use merit aid program eligibility in thirteen states with sharp test
score cutoffs to evaluate the effects of college funding on the early labor market outcomes of
college graduates. I also examine the heterogeneity of the effects with respect to ability and
family income. I demonstrate that the primary causal effect of qualifying for a merit aid program
is to lower the loan burden of students by $5800-$7200. Eligibility has little impact on other
outcomes while in school. However, students who qualify for merit aid programs have $2300$6000 lower annual income one year after graduation, and a different occupational profile four
years after graduation than those who just missed qualifying for the programs. Because merit aid
eligibility changes little of the college experience other than the funding package, it functions as
an instrument for loans. This implies that exogenously increasing the loan burden of a college
graduate by $1000 increases her annual income by $400-$800 one year after graduation. Together
these results demonstrate that while merit aid scholarships may provide students with more
flexibility to seek out jobs with non-pecuniary rewards, there is no detrimental financial impact of
instead financing college with loans.
OTHER PAPERS AND WORK IN PROGRESS
“Long Run Outcomes of Child Labor” Stephanie Chapman, September 2015.
In this paper I estimate the long-term individual effect of child labor using a linked census sample
from 1900 and 1910 to 1940. The sample consists of over 730,000 males from the US birth
cohorts of 1884 to 1904. To solve the fundamental identification problem that starting work later
implies higher school achievement under compulsory education laws, I use a difference in
difference strategy to exploit both changes in minimum working age laws and compulsory school
start ages across fourteen states. I find that the effect of starting work a year earlier - controlling
for missed school - is an increase of $8 of annual income in 1940. While modest, this effect is
roughly the same as the marginal benefit of an extra year of school controlling for age of allowed
labor market entry. This implies that families during this time period were likely optimally
allocating the time of work eligible children between work and school. To conclude, I discuss the
implications of this research for modern policy design aimed at eradicating child labor in
developing countries. In particular, modern policy must account for the benefits of work to
children if they intend to improve the welfare of those children.
Stephanie Chapman, Page 3
“Racial wage gaps among immigrant groups” Quincy Thomas Stewart, Stephanie Chapman,
Yasmiyn Irizarry, Jeffrey Dixon [in progress]
It has been shown that there are wage gaps between male prime age, full time workers along
racial lines, and that when controlling for observable characteristics, particularly flexibly
controlling for labor market by using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), this gap is robust to
immigrant status. The wage gap between differently-raced immigrants is roughly the same as the
wage gap between differently-raced native born workers (Stewart and Dixon, 2010). This project
aims to more richly document these wage gaps by studying three groups less examined by the
literature: subgroups of Latino and Asian individuals defined by national groups, and major racial
categories of women. For the Latino and Asian subgroups, we aim to describe which subgroups
are more successful at assimilating into the white American working culture, as is documented by
their wage gaps with white native and foreign born men. Here we find that there is indeed
significant heterogeneity across groups in the magnitude of the wage gaps that exist, indicating
that some subgroups are more successful at assimilating and approaching wage parity with their
white counterparts. Groups that have a higher fraction of European ancestry, such as Cubans or
Columbians, have lower wage gaps and their wage gaps close more quickly after immigration
than populations that have predominantly African or indigenous ancestry, such as Dominicans or
Guatemalans. For women we document the racial gaps among the main racial groups (white,
black, asian and latino) and explore how these gaps are similar to the wage gaps observed among
men. We find that women experience more muted wage gaps by race and immigrant status
relative to their male counterparts, and that the gaps along both dimensions are dwarfed by the
gender wage gaps observed. We are exploring whether these muted effects are related to
differences in employment and labor force participation among women from different racial and
immigrant groups.
“Student Loans with Income Based Repayment” Stephanie Chapman [in progress].
Per presidential order, starting in the summer of 2008 students with federal loans have access to a
far more generous income-based loan repayment plan than had previously been available. This
project aims to leverage this new policy as variation with two waves of the Baccalaureate and
Beyond data to examine how students respond to a change in their short-term effective loan
burden after all schooling decisions have been made. Previous literature suggests that such a
program will significantly relax the constraints students are facing, since students seem to
respond to short-term liquidity constraints. The source of variation here differs from that used in
my job market paper, since here the loan burden is shifted beyond the short term whereas with
state merit aid programs students take on fewer loans. A comparison of the results obtained will
shed light on the mechanisms leading students to pursue different occupations and compensation,
and further inform policy on how policy towards existing loans might be handled in order to
minimize the impacts on income and occupational choice demonstrated in my job market paper.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Conference and Seminar Presentations:
Workshop in Applied Microeconomics, Northwestern University, Oct 2015
H2D2 Research Day Conference (Poster), UM-Ann Arbor, Dec 2014
Chicago Area Workshop in Family Economics, Chicago Federal Reserve, March 2014
Refereeing: Review of Economic Dynamics
Stephanie Chapman, Page 4
REFERENCES
Professor Diane Schanzenbach
School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-491-3884
E-mail: dws@northwestern.edu
Professor Matthias Doepke
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-491-8207
E-mail: doepke@northwestern.edu
Professor Matthew Notowidigdo
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-491-8230
E-mail: noto@northwestern.edu
Professor Jon Guryan
School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-467-7144
Email: j-guryan@northwestern.edu