About

Professor Peter S. Arcidiacono is the William Henry Glasson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Duke University, where he has been a faculty member since 2010. His research specializes in applied microeconomics, applied economics, and labor economics, with a primary focus on education and discrimination. His work explores a variety of subjects including structural estimation, affirmative action, minimum wages, teen sex, discrimination, higher education, and dynamic discrete choice models. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation for projects such as the CCP Estimation of Dynamic Discrete Choice Models with Unobserved Heterogeneity, and has been awarded grants from NICHD and the Smith Richardson Foundation for research on topics like teen sex, abortion, childbearing, and race and peer effects in college settings. Professor Arcidiacono is also involved in several recent studies examining the effects of minimum wage increases, cross-racial differences in teenage labor force participation, and gender interactions in laboratory and field settings. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a B.S. from Willamette University.

Research topics

• Economics
• Psychology
• Econometrics
• Computer science
• Political science

Selected publications

• Equilibrium Grading Policies With Implications for Female Interest in STEM Courses

  Econometrica · 2024-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  We show that stricter grading policies in STEM courses reduce STEM enrollment, especially for women. We estimate a model of student demand for courses and optimal effort choices given professor grading policies. Grading policies are treated as equilibrium objects that in part depend on student demand for courses. Differences in demand for STEM and non‐STEM courses explain much of why STEM classes give lower grades. Restrictions on grading policies that equalize average grades across classes reduce the STEM gender gap and increase overall enrollment in STEM classes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Experimentally Validating Welfare Evaluation of School Vouchers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• College Attrition and the Dynamics of Information Revelation

  Journal of Political Economy · 2024-08-05 · 16 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We examine how informational frictions impact schooling and work outcomes by estimating a dynamic structural model where individuals face uncertainty about their academic ability and productivity, which determine their schooling utility and wages. We account for different college types, majors, occupational search frictions, and work hours. Individuals learn from grades and wages, which may affect their choices. Removing informational frictions would increase graduation by 4.4 percentage points and by an additional 2 points without search frictions. Providing students with full information about their abilities would increase the college and white-collar wage premia while reducing the graduation gap by family income.

  PublisherDOI

• Experimentally Validating Welfare Evaluation of School Vouchers

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers in rural India to estimate willingness-to-pay for greater school choice, a key input for assessing welfare impacts of alternative voucher designs.We find that a voucher targeted to households with limited assets, a proxy for ability-to-pay constraints, yields a marginal value of public funds (MVPF) greater than 3.We obtain this result using a multistep research design that isolates the information contributed by experimental data.We begin by estimating several models of school choice on control data alone, reserving data from treatment markets for model selection via outof-sample validation.All of the models underpredict take-up of the randomized voucher offer.Evidence from treatment markets points to why: the program induced household search and led private schools to use voucher surplus to attract students.We incorporate these mechanisms into a unified model, estimated with both treatment and control data, that successfully explains the observed choice patterns.Our experience highlights that credible policy analysis requires modeling choice frictions and supply responses and using experimental data in estimation.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: "What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal About Racial Preferences"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-03-17

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is the replication package for "What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal About Racial Preferences," accepted in 2023 by the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.

  PublisherDOI

• What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal about Racial Preferences

  Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics · 2023-04-24 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA [Students for Fair Admissions] v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC [University of North Carolina] cases, we examine how racial preferences for underrepresented minorities affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC–Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are, on average, over four times higher than if they had been treated as white. For typical Hispanic applicants the increase is 2.4 times. At UNC, in-state African Americans’ admit rate is over 70% higher. For out-of-state applicants, the increase is more than tenfold. At both universities, racial preferences are larger for those from more advantaged backgrounds.

  PublisherDOI

• College Attrition and the Dynamics of Information Revelation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Replication data for: Beyond Signaling and Human Capital: Education and the Revelation of Ability

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2022-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We provide evidence that college graduation plays a direct role in revealing ability to the labor market. Using the NLSY79, our results suggest that ability is observed nearly perfectly for college graduates, but is revealed to the labor market more gradually for high school graduates. Consequently, from the beginning of their careers, college graduates are paid in accordance with their own ability, while the wages of high school graduates are initially unrelated to their own ability. This view of ability revelation in the labor market has considerable power in explaining racial differences in wages, education, and returns to ability. (JEL D82, I21, I23, J24, J31)

  PublisherDOI

• What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal About Racial Preferences

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Identification and Estimation of Continuous-Time Job Search Models with Preference Shocks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Large State Space Issues in Dynamic Models

  NSF · $391k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Tyler Ransom

  University of Oklahoma

  92 shared

• Esteban Aucejo

  71 shared

• John Singleton

  University of Rochester

  71 shared

• Arnaud Maurel

  70 shared

• Karthik Muralidharan

  69 shared

• Eun-young Shim

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  67 shared

• V. Joseph Hotz

  University of Chicago

  53 shared

• Patrick Bayer

  41 shared

Awards & honors

• William Henry Glasson Distinguished Professor of Economics (…