Maurel Wins 2015 Dennis J. Aigner Award

26 October 2015 2:49PM

Professor Arnaud Maurel’s paper, “Inference on an Extended Roy Model, with an Application to Schooling Decisions in France,” has been selected as the winner of the 2015 Dennis J. Aigner Award. Maurel, along with co-author Xavier D’Haultfoeuille (CREST), will receive a $5,000 prize.

Published in the Journal of Econometrics (JoE) in 2013, the paper was selected by a committee of JoE fellows as the best paper in empirical econometrics published by the journal in 2013 or 2014.

In this paper, Maurel and D’Haultfoeuille develop a new econometric method that allows researchers to flexibly estimate the role of expected monetary returns against preferences in the context of sorting across sectors. The method is used to quantify the relative importance of non-pecuniary factors and expected returns to schooling in the decision to pursue higher education in France.

The authors find that non-pecuniary factors play a dominant role in the aforementioned decision. Notably, their estimates imply that the higher education attendance rate would fall from 83.1 percent to 72 percent in the absence of non-pecuniary factors. This decrease is eight times larger than the one associated with a 10 percent decrease in labor market earnings of higher education attendees.

Maurel and his co-author will receive the award during the Journal of Econometrics Fellows and Editors dinner at the January 2016 Allied Social Science Association Annual Meetings in San Francisco.

Past recipients of the award include James Heckman (University of Chicago), David Lee (Princeton University), Azeem Shaikh (University of Chicago), and Ed Vytlacil (Yale University).

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