Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long time-to-degree. In response to these long-standing problems, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs, and in turn reduce attrition and shorten time-to-degree. Over a 10-year period starting in 1991, the Foundation provided a total of $80 million to 51 departments at 10 major research universities. This paper estimates the impact of the GEI on attrition rates and time-to-degree. Our analysis is based on a competing-risk duration model and student-level data spanning the start of the GEI, including data on students at a set of control departments. We estimate that, on average, the GEI had modest impacts on student outcomes in the expected directions: reducing attrition rates, reducing time-to-degree, and increasing completion rates. The overall impacts of the GEI appear to have been driven in part by reductions in cohort size, increases in financial aid, and increases in student quality. KeywordsResearch universities, academic performance, PhD programs Comments Suggested Citation Groen, J., Jakubson, G., Ehrenberg, R. G., Condie, S., Liu, A. Y. (2005 AbstractDoctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long time-to-degree. In response to these long-standing problems, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs, and in turn reduce attrition and shorten time-to-degree. Over a 10-year period starting in 1991, the Foundation provided a total of $80 million to 51 departments at 10 major research universities. This paper estimates the impact of the GEI on attrition rates and time-to-degree. Our analysis is based on a competing-risk duration model and student-level data spanning the start of the GEI, including data on students at a set of control departments. We estimate that, on average, the GEI had modest impacts on student outcomes in the expected directions: reducing attrition rates, reducing time-to-degree, and increasing completion rates. The overall impacts of the GEI appear to have been driven in part by reductions in cohort size, increases in financial aid, and increases in student quality.* We are grateful to

No abstract

This paper proves the existence and robustness of partially-revealing rational expectations equilibria (REE) when this equilibrium concept is expanded to allow for some agents to have preferences that display ambiguity aversion. Furthermore, the generic existence of fully-revealing REE is proven for a commonly-used subset of the class of ambiguity averse preferences. This finding illustrates that models with ambiguity aversion provide a relatively tractable framework through which partial information revelation may be studied in a general equilibrium setting without relying on particular distributional assumptions or the presence of noise traders. Constructive examples provide further insight into the properties of these equilibria.

Asset pricing, Recursive multiple priors, Survival, Heterogeneous investors, Ambiguity aversion, G12, D59,

We study how information about an asset affects optimal portfolios and equilibrium asset prices when investors are not sure about the model that predicts future asset values and thus treat the information as ambiguous. We show that this ambiguity leads to optimal portfolios that are insensitive to news even though there are no information processing costs or other market frictions. In equilibrium, we show that stock prices may not react to public information that is worse than expected and this mispricing of bad news leads to profitable trading strategies based on public information.