Assoc. Prof. Arnauld Maurel, Ph.D.

“College Attrition and the Dynamics of Information Revelation”

In this paper, published in the Journal of Political Economy, Arnaud Maurel and his co-authors examine how informational frictions impact schooling and work outcomes. To do so, the researchers estimate a dynamic structural model where individuals face uncertainty about their academic ability and productivity, which respectively determine their schooling utility and wages. Individuals learn from grades and wages in a correlated manner, and may change their choices as a result. Removing informational frictions would increase the college graduation rate by 4.4 percentage points, which would increase further by 2 percentage points in the absence of search frictions. Providing students with full information about their abilities would also result in large increases in the college and white-collar wage premia, while reducing the college graduation gap by family income.

Mr. Maurel’s research interests are in Labor Economics/Education and Microeconometrics. Most of his non-methodological work lies at the intersection between the economics of education and labor economics, with a focus on post-secondary education demand and occupational choices. His econometrics research focuses on the identification and estimation of selection and treatment effect models as well as models of occupational choice and job search, and on data combination issues.

Arnauld Maurel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University and is currently visiting Toulouse School of Economics (2024–25). He is also a Research Associate at the NBER (Labor Studies) and IZA, and currently an Associate Editor at Quantitative Economics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and Annals of Economics and Statistics. He received his PhD from Paris School of Economics and CREST.