About

Jack Mountjoy is an Associate Professor of Economics (untenured) and Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His primary research fields include Labor Economics, Economics of Education, and Applied Econometrics.

Research topics

• Economics
• Econometrics
• Political Science
• Statistics
• Demographic economics
• Medicine
• Medical education
• Mathematics
• Labour economics
• Psychology
• Accounting

Selected publications

• The Returns to College(s): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 26 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the state of Texas, we identify relative college value-added by comparing the outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances observable student potential across college treatments and renders our extensive set of covariates irrelevant as controls. Methodologically, we develop a framework for identifying and interpreting value-added under varying assumptions about match effects and sorting gains. Empirically, we estimate a relatively tight, though non-degenerate, distribution of relative value-added across the wide diversity of Texas public universities. Selectivity poorly predicts value-added within student choice sets, with only a fleeting selectivity earnings premium fading to zero after a few years in the labor market. Non-peer college inputs like instructional spending more strongly predict value-added, especially conditional on selectivity. Colleges that boost BA completion, especially in STEM majors, also tend to boost earnings. Finally, we probe the potential for (mis)match effects by allowing value-added schedules to vary by student characteristics.

• Marginal Returns to Public Universities

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-12-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article studies the returns to enrolling in U.S. public universities by comparing the long-term outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10% of all American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment. The typical marginally admitted student gains an additional year of education in the four-year sector, becomes 12 percentage points more likely to ever earn a bachelor’s degree, and eventually earns 8% more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart. Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 26% for the marginal students themselves, 16% for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 7% for the government budget. Earnings gains are similar across admitting institutions of varying selectivity, but smaller for students from low-income families, who spend more time enrolled but complete fewer degrees and major in less lucrative fields. Finally, I develop a method to separately identify effects for students on the extensive margin of attending any university versus those on the margin of attending a more selective one, revealing larger effects on the extensive margin.

  PublisherDOI

• Marginal Returns to Public Universities

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-04-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper studies the returns to enrolling in American public universities by comparing the longterm outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants.I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of all American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment.The typical marginally admitted student gains an additional year of education in the four-year sector, becomes 12 percentage points more likely to ever earn a bachelor's degree, and eventually earns 8 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart.Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 26 percent for the marginal students themselves, 16 percent for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 7 percent for the government budget.Earnings gains are similar across admitting institutions of varying selectivity, but smaller for students from lowincome families, who spend more time enrolled but complete fewer degrees and major in less lucrative fields.Finally, I develop a method to separately identify effects for students on the extensive margin of attending any university versus those on the margin of attending a more selective one, revealing larger effects on the extensive margin.

  PublisherDOI

• Marginal Returns to Public Universities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marginal Returns to Public Universities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On the Use of Outcome Tests for Detecting Bias in Decision Making

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2023-08-22 · 18 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The decisions of judges, lenders, journal editors, and other gatekeepers often lead to significant disparities across affected groups. An important question is whether, and to what extent, these group-level disparities are driven by relevant differences in underlying individual characteristics or by biased decision makers. Becker (1957, 1993) proposed an outcome test of bias based on differences in post-decision outcomes across groups, inspiring a large and growing empirical literature. The goal of our paper is to offer a methodological blueprint for empirical work that seeks to use outcome tests to detect bias. We show that models of decision making underpinning outcome tests can be usefully recast as Roy models, since heterogeneous potential outcomes enter directly into the decision maker’s choice equation. Different members of the Roy model family, however, are distinguished by the tightness of the link between potential outcomes and decisions. We show that these distinctions have important implications for defining bias, deriving logically valid outcome tests of such bias, and identifying the marginal outcomes that the test requires.

  PublisherDOI

• On the Use of Outcome Tests for Detecting Bias in Decision Making

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

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Community Colleges and Upward Mobility

  American Economic Review · 2022 · 103 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics
  • Economics

  Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from four-year institutions cast ambiguity over two-year colleges’ contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of two-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value added for two-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate four-year entry. (JEL I23, I26, I28, J24, J31)

  PublisherDOI

• The Returns to College(S): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Community Colleges and Upward Mobility

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brent Hickman

  Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

  69 shared

• Magne Mogstad

  Statistics Norway

  7 shared

• Marianne Bertrand

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Ivan A. Canay

  3 shared

• Patrick McAlvanah

  Federal Trade Commission

  1 shared

• Keith B. Anderson

  1 shared

• Robert Letzler

  United States Government Accountability Office

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the National Academy of Education and Spence…