As a CASFI Fellow, Dirk Krüger from the University of Pennsylvania has been at CASFI several times before. We are delighted to host him once again. He will be in Bonn from 11–13 May and will return for a second stay from 8–11 June.
During his stay, Krüger will focus on the aggregate and distributional consequences of the "Demographic Cliff", a scenario with lower population growth that will reduce the number of high-school graduates in the coming decades, for the college market, the labor market and public finances. Krüger states that "this demographic shift occurs against the backdrop of technological change (e.g., the emergence of AI) in the labor market". Therefore he will analyze these trends jointly: "I will then explore how public education finance reforms shape these outcomes. To do so, I plan to construct, characterize and estimate a general equilibrium life-cycle model of the college market with heterogeneous colleges, student college quality and major choice, and subsequent labor market outcomes of workers in different occupations. The cross-sectional distribution of college quality and major specialization is an equilibrium outcome and is shaped by the demographic structure of the economy, by public education spending and college loan policies, as well as by the endogenous relative wages that college graduates with different majors command in the labor market." This work will be conducted in collaboration with Irina Popova from the University of Bonn and Alex Ludwig from the European University Institute.
We are pleased to welcome Dirk Krüger back to CASFI and look forward to the insights his research will bring.