News

Alena Bičáková's Paper to Be Published in the Economic Journal

27 January, 2021

We are proud to announce that our Senior Researcher and Deputy Director for Graduate Studies, Alena Bičáková, has co-authored a paper entitled "Caught in the Cycle: Economic Conditions at Enrolment and Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates" that has been accepted to be published by the Economic Journal.

The three authors, Alena Bičáková, Guido Matias Cortes (York University) and Jacopo Mazza (University of Essex), are the first ones to look at the impact of economic conditions at the time of university enrollment on labor market outcomes later in life. They find that enrollment in universities during a recession has a positive impact both on academic performance and on earned wages. This is in stark contrast to the negative impact on labor market outcomes of graduating into a recession, as documented in previous research. The authors attribute the positive impact of recessions at the time of college entry to an increase in effort that the students exert during their studies in response to the adverse economic conditions. The paper analyses data from fifty-eight cohorts of university graduates in the United Kingdom and the results are stronger for male than female graduates.

The Economic Journal is one of the top journals in economics. The journal has provided a platform for high-quality, imaginative economic research, earning a worldwide reputation for excellence as a general interest journal, publishing papers in all fields of economics for a broad international readership.

Many congratulations! An unedited manuscript is available for subscribers on the Economic Journal’s website.