 A Comment on "College Enrollment and Mandatory FAFSA Applications: Evidence from Louisiana"Guillaume Morlet, Thi Kim Dung Dang and Mirinda Anderson No 218, I4R Discussion Paper Series from The Institute for Replication (I4R) Abstract: Christa Denault (2023) examines the effect of a policy implemented in Louisiana that mandates that high school students are required to complete the FAFSA as part of the requirements to graduate high school. In her preferred specification (equation (1)), she used a two-way fixed effects estimation strategy, with a continuous treatment dose to find that the mandate increased FAFSA completion rates by 19 percent and implied an increase in college enrollment of 1 to 2 percentage points. She complements this result with an event study to test for parallel trends, and finally an instrumental variable estimation. First, we find that the paper is computationally reproducible. We focused on the reproduction of Tables 2 and 3 and Figure 2. Second, we document that the author's results are largely robust. The author's treatment variable is the FAFSA completion rate. When we substitute this by the FAFSA submission rate, the author's results remain qualitatively identical. We also find that the IV results are robust to many alternative specifications. Furthermore, the parallel trends assumption, and no treatment assumption made by the author for the specification in equation (1) (inherent to difference-in-difference estimation) seems robust. Date: 2025 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:218 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in I4R Discussion Paper Series from The Institute for Replication (I4R) |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.