Book: Felony Review by Randy Barnett

Barnett, Randy. 2026. Felony Review. Encounter Books.

The publisher codes the book as "true crime", but one could argue that Felony Report is really a professional memoir rather than a proper "true crime" book, in the sense that it is really about what it was like to work in the office of the State's Attorney in Chicago in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Telling that story means telling some stories about crimes, especially about how the crimes played out for their perpetrators in court, but the book is much more than just those stories. Indeed, one of my favorite bits of the book (pages 79-81 for those playing along at home) explains how the skills required to be a good prosecutor differ from those required to be a good defense attorney, so more labor economics than sordid criminal detail. 

The book also reveals an impressive familiarity with cop shows and lawyer shows both modern and, even more so, vintage, including many shows from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Overall, Randy is not so pleased with their representation of prosecutors and their role in the criminal justice system.

The title of the book refers to one of Randy's first jobs within the office of the State's Attorney, namely reviewing potential felony cases to see if they merited pursuing. This role within the office, which began in part as a way of unclogging the courts and focusing prosecutorial resources on the most winnable cases, put him in a position to interview both suspects and victims and do to occasional bits of detective work. 

I know Randy in the sense that we met a few times many years ago at libertarian events when I was in gradual school at the University of Chicago. I have followed his (quite impressive) career from a distance since that time and look forward to reading his longer biography, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. 

I purchased Felony Review at Madison Street Books. Perhaps oddly, Madison Street Books is in Chicago rather than Madison, sitting not far from Greektown in an area I would not have walked in at night when I was a graduate student but which has become a hipster haven. It has become my favorite stop for new books in Chicago outside of Hyde Park.

Book: The Chile Project by Sebastian Edwards

Edwards, Sebastian. 2023. The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. Princeton University Press.

This book provides a history, aimed at an intelligent lay (i.e., non-economist) reader, of the "Chicago Boys," the group of Chilean economists whose market-oriented program was adopted by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship following the military coup that deposed the elected president Salvador Allende. Edwards is well-positioned to tell the story, as he is Chilean, an economist and long-time faculty member at UCLA, and knows most of the players in the story including the Chicago Boys, without being a Chicago Boy himself. 

The first thing I learned from the book was that Allende's ideology lay further to the left than I had imagined. The second thing I learned was that he was not only very far to the left but also apparently very far from competence. Edwards shares a derisive remark made in private by French philosopher Michel Foucault blaming the "Marxists" for the coup and its aftermath as well as a statement by left-leaning development  economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan that "Salvador Allende died not because he was a socialist, but because he was an incompetent ... It is not inherent in socialism to be inefficient." We can debate the second bit of that sentence while still recognizing the very large difference between thoughtful socialists who understand some economics and silly socialists who do not. The third thing I learned is that the reforms moved along in fits and starts, and that most of the economic growth they engendered actually took place under the early center-left post-dictatorship administrations, which retained the reforms while attempting to soften their effects via a more generous welfare state.

The broad arc of the book addresses the question of how the largely successful reforms of the Chicago Boys, and the economic growth that eventually followed from them (and which moved Chile to the top of the Latin American economic league table), ended up engendering an intense left-wing backlash both against specific reforms and against "neoliberalism" more generally. Edwards identifies four main factors, two involving specific policy design choices and two broader failures of imagination. 

The first policy mistake was setting the contribution rate for the private pension accounts in the compulsory-savings scheme too low, leading to a lot of unhappiness decades later when Chileans discovered that their realized pension benefits did not match the promises made when the system began. The second was the failure of policy design in the university sector, where the setup allowed nominally non-profit but factually for-profit post-secondary institutions, whose troubles in Chile mirror the issues that arose with explicitly for-profit institutions in the US. 

The first broader failure of imagination was the failure to grow a true culture of liberalism (without the neo). This sort of culture-building exercise is not something economists train to do, and requires the patient building of institutions and the cultivation of liberal scholars and activists outside of economics. In a strong liberal culture, the lure of excessive state power may lessen on both the left and the right. The second broader failure concerns a lack of attention to both the perception and the reality of socio-economic mobility in a society with a rigid pre-existing class structure. I agree with Edwards that in order to support reforms that increase the size of the aggregate economy, the broader public needs to feel like they have a stake in them, which they may not if family background still largely determines outcomes.

The book notes but does not dwell on the many non-economic evils of the Pinochet regime. It also discusses but does not dwell on the question of what various Chicago Boys knew about those evils and when they knew it. The question of when doing good within an evil regime represents the right choice always remains in the mind of the reader, but this book does not aim to answer it. Instead, it aims to explain the history behind the recent backlash against the reforms, a backlash that ultimately led to the failed attempt to replace the Pinochet-era constitution with a thoroughly left-wing one. That is enough for one book.

I learned much from this book both about the history of the Chicago Boys and about Chile and its history more generally. I valued Edwards's sympathetic but critical perspective on the Chicago Boys and their reforms. The book is very much worth reading if one is interested in the episode and in lessons for liberalism in other contexts. 

I bought this on Abebooks for an online book club of aging Chicago economists that I ended up not being able to attend due to a conflict.

TV: The American Experiment [Netflix]

Over its five parts, The American Experiment covers the lead-up to the American Revolution, the revolution itself, the period under the Articles of Confederation, and finally the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. It has the standard features of historical documentaries in the present age: talking heads, old photos, old locations, and little mini-reenactments with too few actors (e.g., the reenacted continental army has only about 50 soldiers). 

The talking heads include a number of authors of relevant books, some more academic and some more popular. I seek out Tom Nichol's writing in the Atlantic and enjoyed seeing him on screen. I liked most of the others too, and would be curious to know how much control they had over the substantive content of their bits.

The talking heads also include a veritable jamboree of politicians, including Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, Ron Wyden, Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, Mike Pence, and Rand Paul. I think their presence represents an effort to make the show visually bipartisan in a sort of pre-MAGA, pre-DSA way (those were the days ...). Tom Hanks is one of the executive producers and I tend to associate him with bipartisan, civic-minded impulses of this sort. While I have some amount of patience for Jeff Flake and Rand Paul, I would have skipped the politicians entirely in favor of more historians. I think including politicians will serve mainly to make the documentary age faster than it otherwise would. 

The academic in me was bothered by the absence of references to John Locke or any of the other philosophers whose ideas filled the heads of the Founders and guided them as they declared and constituted. A naive viewer could easily come away from the documentary thinking that the founders thought up classical liberalism on their own. They did not.

Finally, the show on a few occasions refers directly to current events in order to bash a certain sitting president. These bits will speed up the show's aging even more than Al Gore. And they are unnecessary! Even relatively dim viewers will get the point by just having the talking heads, or the narrator, repeat relevant lines from the Declaration of Independence or Common Sense or the Federalist Papers. The show does not need to beat the viewer over the head, and do some damage to its bipartisan mojo, by connecting the already painfully obvious dots. 

To close, let me balance out my criticisms by noting that others in my household found the series entertaining and informative. And I did not mind most of it either.

Book: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship

Masur, Louis. 2025. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship. Oxford University Press. 

I read this short - just 160 pages - book over the past couple of weeks in honor of 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I would categorize it as an academic books aimed at a non-specialist audience. There are footnotes and sources, but I am pretty sure the book was an impulse buy on display near the checkout stand of some independent bookstore. 

The book tells the story of a road trip that Jefferson and Madison took in 1791, so well after the revolution and well before their respective presidential terms. They travelled from Virginia to New York, a journey not new to either, and from there up the Hudson, across to Vermont, and then back down to New York via Long Island. The book covers the whole tour but highlights three destinations and uses these to motivate discussions of three topics in greater detail: the Hessian fly, race and slavey, and the prospect of an American maple sugar industry. The (mis-named) Hessian fly was reducing colonial wheat harvests at the time, and so piqued Jefferson's interests in both botany and economic development. The section on race and slavery includes some material on the American Colonization Society, which prompted me to look a bit into the literature on it as well as the related literature on Liberia. Maple sugar was viewed by some at the time, including Jefferson, as a possible avenue to economic development and as a moral opportunity to reduce the consumption of the cane sugar produced by slaves in the Caribbean. Alas, it never really took off and, more narrowly, Jefferson never succeeded in getting any sugar maple trees to grow at Monticello despite multiple attempts. Through it all, the friendship between Jefferson and Madison develops, and Jefferson rates all the of the inns they stay at as poor, middling, or good in his notes.

In sum, a bite-sized piece of early Republic history, with special interest for afficionados of the two founders at the center of the story. I enjoyed it.

Purchased on one of my spring travels, but I do not recall just where. I can rule out the JF Bookstore in DC, the little store in the Statler Inn at Cornell, Literati in Ann Arbor, the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and the MIT Press Bookstore based on my receipts. Hmmm .... 

Book: The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love

Love, Robert. 2010. The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Viking.

Perhaps surprisingly, the "Great Oom" is actually a person, namely a fellow called Pierre Arnold Bernard, who played a key role in the importation and development of hatha yoga into the United States. The book chronicles his Midwest origins, including his initial encounters with yoga in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska, his sojourn on the west coast, his years in New York City and then his years of success and eventual decline, brought on by the Great Depression, in the small town of Nyack-on-Hudson. He received the "Great Oom" nickname from the press, and it ended up following him throughout his life.

Bernard's personal journey offers plenty to interest the reader. It also sheds a broader light on American life, especially in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Then, like now, celebrities and the rich gravitated to Eastern mysticism and health fads. Then as now the media loved a moral panic, especially one involving the bodies of the rich and famous. Then, as now, people like Bernard become less daring with age and success. Indeed, my one complaint about the book concerns how little the reader learns about how Bernard saw his own public and private evolution over the course of his life. Overall, I quite enjoyed the book. 

If you think you'll like it, you will.

I purchased this book many years ago at the Crazy Wisdom bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Economics Moment of Zen #20

Reviewer #2: "I did not enjoy reading the paper, which is a slog to get through."

Reviewer #3: "This is a very nicely written, easy to follow, and thorough analysis ..."

The good news is that these divergent views apply to a paper I am handling as an editor, rather than a paper on which I am an author!

UW Live on Immigration

 

The UW Live show provides a link between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its alumni base, though of course anyone can follow along. In that regard, it also embodies the "Wisconsin idea" that the university should benefit everyone in the state, which is taken more seriously on campus than I expected when I first arrived.

The show was explained to me as a partial substitute for in-person road shows in Chicago and Florida and other places with lots of alumni. The livestream costs less than the road shows and reaches more alums. In this case, we had more than 450 steady viewers of the initial livestream. 

Several of my colleagues appear in earlier episodes, including Ananth Seshadri, Kim Ruhl, and Lydia Cox. The host, Mike Knetter, is an economist who used to be the boss of the alumni association and the foundation.

Two of the sources I found most useful in preparing are this AEI piece on the fiscal costs of immigration and this Pew report on the number of undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to those who have pressed me over the years to do more public engagement. 

Book: Qualitative Literacy by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco

Small, Mario Luis and Jessica McCrory Calarco. 2022. Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. University of California Press.

This (short) book lays out clear standards by which outsiders can judge the quality of qualitative empirical research in the social sciences. It has in mind in particular ethnographic work, in which the researcher embeds themselves into a context, thoughtfully observes, takes lots of notes, and then attempts to construct meaning from the notes. It also discusses, and applies the same conceptual framework to, research based on in-depth semi-structured interviews. I am a sometimes consumer of ethnographies and have often wished for a book like this one, as I, not at all surprisingly, never received any formal training in ethnographic methods along the way, though I could certainly rank the many ethnographies I have read over the years on some implicit quality scale.

The authors organize their book around the notions of cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Cognitive empathy comes first, and has a special salience in polarized times when it seems deficient on all sides. But ethnographers really need it in a way that ordinary folk do not, for without it they can never hope to really understand their subjects. Heterogeneity basically means that if everyone in some group comes off as identical, then the ethnographer has done a bad job, in the sense that they have surely missed important features of those they purport to study. Palpability means sharing telling details rather than just offering generalities. Follow-up means investigating interesting bits as they come up during fieldwork (or in a long-form interview). Put differently, it means not rigidly adhering to some ex ante research plan. In qualitative work, as in quantitative work, the most interesting bits will sometimes be those that depart from the explicit or implicit "pre-analysis plan", which of course does not imply that the pre-analysis plan was not worth doing. And self-awareness means the researcher needs to think about how they - their features and their words and their behavior - affect the content of their research. 

Overall, a remarkably clear and concise guide. Nothing was super surprising to me, but I found the value-added from organizing the material into a clean conceptual framework and providing many examples both real and contrived quite large.

Recommended to consumers (and producers!) of qualitative research.

I ordered this book from the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago.

Book: VIXI by Richard Pipes

Pipes, Richard. 2003. VIXI. Yale University Press.

I read Pipe's book "Survival is Not Enough" back in college. That book reinforced my own views on the Soviet Union, which were based in part on an in-person visit in 1979 as part of a broader European tour with a student group. Since then, I have purchased several of his books used, though this, his memoir, is the first I have managed to read.

His life divides rather neatly into a sequence of parts: growing up in Poland as a Jew, escape from Poland just in time, education in the United States, life as a Harvard professor, his time on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, a somewhat different life (due to his higher public profile) back at Harvard after that, and then retirement. As with many academics, retirement for Pipes just means more time for research and less time spent on teaching and administration (there is a reason for the quip "I need to retire to get some work done" that one hears among economists).

I found the initial part about growing up in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s and then leaving (with a fair amount of uncertainty of success) for the United States and the part about his time in the Reagan administration the most interesting, perhaps because being a history professor is a lot like being an economics professor and I already know how that goes. The Poland and DC components read quite differently: the former basks in the glow of a gentle nostalgia, the latter bluntly settles a lot of scores. Pipes argues that he had real effects on policy and thereby helped speed the demise of the Soviet Union, surely a worthy life contribution for anyone.

I enjoyed the book a great deal, both as academic memoir and as history. Recommended.

I found this at some used bookstore somewhere, and not that long ago, but do not recall which one.

Statistical software visual pun

 Hat tip: An old friend.

Book: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel

Angel, Katherine. 2022. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Verso.

The book presents a critique of current consent-based, heavily contracted norms regarding sexual interactions from what one might call a left-humanist perspective.

If that sounds like something you would find interesting, you'll like the book.

I purchased this book at the Dussman English Bookshop in Berlin. It has the virtue of being open quite late so that one can stop by on the way home from dinner.

Oh dear [insert deeply disturbing noises here]

 

Hat tip: The only person for whom I have written a letter who has also written a letter for me.

Book: Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter

McWhorter, John. 2021. Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. Avery Books.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia. He also writes a column on language issues, broadly conceived, for the New York Times, and appears as a frequent guest on the Glenn Show podcast with economist Glenn Loury. Befitting his many accomplishments, he has a fine website.

I have read three of his books. The first was his book on black English, which I blogged about several years ago and quite liked. The second was his Woke Racism book, which I did not blog about and liked the least of the three. 

The present book, as its title subtly suggests, concerns the etymology of nine English naughty words, a set that includes words related to religion, such as hell and damn, words related to bodily functions, and racial and other slurs. McWhorter makes the case (drawn from the literature) that the naughtiest of naughty words have evolved over time through the three categories.  

The book delights in both substance and style. The histories of several of the naughty words exhibit wild twists and turns. Along with the summarizing (in most cases) the current consensus among linguists on these histories, McWhorter also elegantly dismisses various myths, such as one false origin story involving the instruction "ship high in transit." He demonstrates an amazing knowledge of pop culture references as well, ranging from obscure Broadway musicals of the past to episodes of the Jeffersons. And the wordplay ... ah the wordplay. So much fun. So many puns. 

My only complaint, which I suspect most readers in his target audience of people who buy small books displayed at the check-out counter of their independent bookstore would not share, is that I would have liked more talk about how linguists came to believe the various etymologies he recounts. I did appreciate the book's discussion of how hard it is to trace down the usage history of some of the words because back in the day people did not write them down, at least not in the sorts of ways that would survive to the present day.  

In short, recommended. I liked it well enough that I bought a fourth McWhorter book when I finished this one. 

Addendum: Fixed McWhorter's affiliation from Brown (that's Loury) to Columbia.

Book: Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences by Michael Billig

Billig, Michael. 2013. Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.

I read this one back during the pandemic and, indeed, even began a review post at that time.

The book offers a frontal assault on bad writing (and thus worse thinking) in the social sciences, with most of the examples drawn from the author's discipline of social psychology. 

Lots of negative lessons here for how to write better in economics, as well as some excellent examples of contributions to acronymic science (e.g., CHAT = "cultural historical activity theory") in the context of branding ones ideas. And wonderous jargon like "ideational metafunction." 

I have not laughed this hard at a non-fiction book since reading Frederick Crews back in gradual school at the recommendation of Nat Wilcox.

Recommended.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Book: The Voltage Effect, by John List

 List, John. 2022. The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. Currency.

This is another one of those books by people I know. John and I overlapped for a time at the University of Maryland in the early noughties, when I was in the regular economics department and he was in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department. We had a handful of quite enjoyable lunches during that time. Once I got to Michigan it was on my to-do list to try and recruit him there, but Chicago hired him before I had a chance to reach out. 

The book mashes up a memoir with discussion of some of John's work as an economist both academic and professional. I found the parts I knew the least about the most engaging, namely the origin story about how John ended up as an economist and his contributions to the various private firms for which he labored along the way. John frames all of the stories in terms of various economic and business concepts and thus as lessons illustrated or sometimes lessons learned. At the end of it all, just when (or if) John sleeps remains unclear.

If you think you would like it, you will.

I won a free signed copy of the book via a raffle sponsored by the BFI (= Becker Friedman Institute or Big Frigging Institute, as you like). 

Society of Labor Economists Call for Papers

The call for papers for the next annual meeting of the Society of Labor Economists is now available!

The meetings will be in Denver on May 1-2, 2026. They will include, among other fine entertainments for the mind, a presidential address by yours truly.

You can find the call for papers here.

Book: Mr. Smith Goes to Prison, by Jeff Smith

Smith, Jeff. 2017. Mr. Smith Goes to Prison. St. Martin's Press.

So, yes, of course I read this partly because the author shares my name. This other Jeff has a doctorate in Political Science and got involved in state politics in Missouri. He (as the dust jacket says) "lied to the feds about seemingly minor campaign malfeasance" and ended up spending 366 days in a minimum-security federal prison. 

The book alternates between telling the author's own story and linking it to broader social science literatures on various aspects of incarceration. The literature surveys, aimed at a sort of intelligent lay audience -- think the audience for the Freakonomics books -- were not perfect to my academic eye but surely fit for purpose. And other Jeff is clearly correct that we could do a lot (a lot) better than we do at incarceration. The current system seems mainly about acting out revenge fantasies on the inmates and providing comfy union jobs for corrections staff rather than about actually changing anyone's behavior upon release. 

I especially enjoyed the parts about prison education, which provide a useful reminder to quantitative social scientists busy estimating the difference in outcomes between those who do and do not receive some treatment that implementation matters a lot. Prison education that no one in charge puts much thought or effort into is unlikely to work. Prison education that someone actually wanted to work might possibly work. The material about prison sociology fascinates as well. Other Jeff is obviously a rather odd duck in prison but manages to find ways to fit in and not constantly get pounded on.

Recommended.

N.B. I read this one a while ago but am catching up on these posts.

Book: Squanto, by Andrew Lipman

Lipman, Andrew. 2024. Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press.

In the traditional telling that was common in my youth, Squanto was the friendly "Indian" (no quotes back then) who helped the pilgrims survive their early years in North America. This book takes on the task of telling Squanto's tale as academic history, which is very much not what I got as a child. Though an academic book, the writing is clear and fun, with occasional wordplay and some clever turns of phrase. Probably that helped it win the Bancroft Prize.

I was surprised by the extent of Squanto's travels -- hence the "Odyssey" in the book's title. He spent time not only near his home in the area near what is now Plymouth, MA, but also in Spain, England, and what are now Newfoundland and Virginia. Not bad for the early 1600s! The material on Squanto's youth is mainly generic, which is to say it simply describes what we know about what life would have been like for a young man in his community in those times. But after that, there is a surprising amount of documentation specifically about him, including in particular writings by various members of the Plymouth colonies, as well as by or related to the people who held him in Europe. I also learned quite a lot about the early colonial period more generally, including the (generally involuntary) travels of other Native Americans to Europe, interactions both positive and negative among different indigenous communities along the Atlantic coast, and the interactions among the various early European settlements and between the settlements and their sponsors. The book also has a welcome epistemological side, as the author talks explicitly about the quality of the available information on various topics and about how he and other historians interpret and learn from it.

Recommended.

I found this book at the delightful Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe, NM.

An addendum: An alert reader points out that while Lipman did indeed win the Bancroft Prize, it was for an earlier book. 

Book: Controlling Contagion by Sheilagh Ogilvie

Ogilvie, Sheilagh. 2025. Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Princeton University Press.

As the title suggests, this book provides a mighty overview of how different institutions -- state, market, community, religion, family, and medical guilds and associations -- influence how societies react to epidemic disease from the Black Death in the 14th century through COVID-19 in the 21st. Ogilvie carefully delineates the strengths and weaknesses of each institution, illuminating each with numerous historical examples. For example, markets produce wealth, which is useful in a whole bunch of ways when fighting contagion, but markets also encourage interaction while failing to price in the social externalities associated with contagion. 

I found the bits about the history of variolation and immunization particularly new and interesting, Who knew that many medical guilds initially opposed one or both for dubious reasons both economic and epistemological? The material on the so-called "European marriage system" and whether or not it helped societies in epidemic times also stood out to me. My one complaint might be the occasional absence of a "denominator" to give me a sense of, when reading one of the many lists of diverse examples of particular points, whether the list contained all of the available examples on that point or just some tiny fraction of them. The final chapter of the book offers some wise thoughts on particularly effective and ineffective institutional combinations, while carefully noting that the very limited historical data as well as obvious identification problems (i.e., more theories and institutions than historical epidemics) severely limit the boldness of any conclusions. 

Recommended.

Full disclosure: I have reached an odd place in life where I could spend all my reading time reading books by people I know and still not read all of the books written by people I know. In this case, Sheilagh is an old friend from graduate school days. As I remember it, she came to Chicago in the midst of her doctoral studies to do a Master's degree in economics, with her main interest being interacting with Gary Becker. You can listen to her lively interview with Tyler Cowen, mostly about this book, here.

New published paper: Bucky, Becky, and Student Financial Aid Policy Design

Marifian, Elise, Jeffrey Smith, and Sarah Turner. 2024. "Bucky, Becky, and Student Financial Aid Policy Design." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 711(1): 200-224.

Abstract

Bucky’s Tuition Promise (BTP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison offers generous financial aid to low-income, in-state students. Unlike many similar programs at other public universities, financial eligibility for BTP depends solely on a family’s adjusted gross income (AGI), rather than on the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or some function of the poverty line. This program design aims to make eligibility simpler and more transparent for students and their families and thereby to encourage application and matriculation. We investigate the implications of the program design for who does and does not receive additional institutional aid, with a particular focus on the marginal group of BTP-eligible students who lack federal Pell Grant eligibility. With this analysis, we aim to motivate a broader discussion of different notions of equity in financial aid administration and the tough trade-offs implicit in simplifying eligibility criteria.

Published version on journal webpage (open access)

NBER Working Paper No. 33053

This paper is published in a special issue of the ANNALS in honor of former UW-Madison chancellor (and former Ford School dean at Michigan) Becky Blank. I first met Becky when she was an assistant professor at Northwestern and I was an assistant professor at Western Ontario. We were on at least one dissertation committee together at Michigan. And, perhaps not surprisingly, she was the only university president who sent me a recruiting email when I was on the job market back in 2016, though she carefully noted that she was not writing to me in her capacity as chancellor, because the chancellor did not meddle in the hiring decisions of individual department, but rather in her capacity as a member of the economics department. She is very much missed.