a number of reforms to improve the effectiveness of public subsidies for college, such as limiting the eligibility of Pell grants to college freshmen and sophomores and providing a larger share of public college tuition subsidies based on students' post-college resources rather than parents' pre-college income and assets. Finally, together with Peter Orszag and David Gunter, Kane finds that higher education spending has been increasingly crowded out by other items of state budgets since the late 1970s, in particular Medicaid, with countercyclical reductions in higher education spending typically becoming permanent in the absence of procyclical increases. Miscellaneous In their research on abortion in the U.S., Kane and Staiger find that restricting the access to abortion (e.g. via abortion clinic closures or restrictions on Medicaid funding) lowered teenage birth rates during the 1980s due to decreases in in-wedlock births (out-of-wedlock births were unaffected). Moreover, Kane, Staiger, Phillip Levine and David Zimmerman find that the fertility rates in those states legalizing abortion decreased by 4% (11% if interstate abortions are taken into account), with most of the impact accruing to reduced births among teenage, middle-aged, non-White and/or unmarried women, thus suggesting that a reversal of Roe v. Wade might raise birth rates but be strongly undermined by abortions being legally performed out of state. Studying the potential of the German vocational training system for the U.S., Kane (together with Dietmar Harhoff) has argued that the conditions that U.S. employers would be less willing to invest into vocational training than in Germany, leading him to doubt that the introduction of the German apprenticeship system would increase the earnings of comparable American youth and improve the school-to-work transitions of in particular minority youth. Selected publications Kane, T.J. (2010). The Price of Admission: Rethinking how Americans Pay for College. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. References External links Profile of Thomas Kane on the website of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty 1961 births Living people United States Council of Economic Advisers 21st-century American economists Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters alumni University of Michigan alumni Harvard Kennedy School alumni Education economists