README for “Factors Affecting College Attainment and Student Ability in the U.S. since 1900” by Kevin Donovan and Christopher Herrington, for Review of Economic Dynamics

There are 4 folders included here, each of which computes a variety of different pieces of the paper. There is a separate README file for each folder, which includes run times and the order in which they should run. 

1. IQ_Transfer_Dist_Estimation — this folder includes everything required to compute the joint distribution of IQ and parental transfers. It requires Stata and Matlab.

2. pi_alpha estimation — this folder constructs the likelihood of college failure. It uses Stata.

3. Wage profile estimation — this folder computes the earnings profiles used in the paper. It uses Stata.

4. Quantitative model — this folder computes all results related to the main quantitative model in the paper. It uses Matlab.


If one were to start from scratch, 1-3 need to be run before the quantitative model, as they are used as inputs. However, the results are already included in this folder, so one can proceed directly to (4) to run the model. Folders 1, 2, and 3 are separate folders that do not overlap, and can be run in any order.