Search Results
Journal Article
Community colleges: not so junior anymore
Nearly half of all undergraduates in the U.S. are attending community colleges. Such colleges are cheaper, closer to home-and much more varied in their offerings than ever before. At some, you can even get a bachelor's degree.
Journal Article
Gender wage gap may be much smaller than most think
Journal Article
The return to education isn't calculated easily
Most studies estimate that the return to each year of education is about 10 percent. But calculating the financial gain is not a cut-and-dried process. Even more difficult is calculating the nonmonetary return.
Journal Article
The gender wage gap
The actual gender wage disparity (which compares the wages of male and female workers with similar labor-force characteristics) is lower than the raw gender earnings gap.
Journal Article
Community colleges and economic mobility
This paper examines the role of community colleges in the U.S. higher education system and their advantages and shortcomings. In particular, it discusses the population of community college students and economic returns to community college education for various demographic groups. It offers new evidence on the returns to an associate's degree. Furthermore, the paper uses data from the National Survey of College Graduates to compare educational objectives, progress, and labor market outcomes of individuals who start their postsecondary education at community colleges with those who start at ...
Working Paper
African-American economic progress in urban areas: a tale of 14 American cities
How significant was the economic progress of African-Americans in the U.S. between 1970 and 2000? In this paper we examine this issue for black men 25-55 years old who live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We present the evidence that significant racial disparities remain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men. We discuss changes in industrial composition, migration, and demographic changes that might have contributed to the stagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, we show that there was no progress in a financial well-being ...
Working Paper
Are children 'normal'?
In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely ?normal.? We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of white married couples in the U.S.: when we restrict comparisons to households living in broadly similar locations (e.g., in expensive urban areas, or in rural areas), completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband?s income. Two alternative models rationalize the data?one in which children are ?normal? and a second in which the observed pattern emerges solely as a ...
Working Paper
The role of location in evaluating racial wage disparity
A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. Researchers hope that estimates from this exercise can be informative about the impact of minority status on labor market success. Here we set out a theoretical justification for this regression in a context in which individuals live and work in different locations. Our model leads to the traditional approach, but with the important caveat that the regression should ...
Journal Article
Local price variation and labor supply behavior
In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: wages and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most theoretical and empirical work in labor supply studies ignore prices other than wages. We address the question of whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as generally assumed. We describe a simple model to demonstrate that the effects of wage and nonlabor income on labor supply typically differ by location. In particular, we show that the derivative of the labor supply with ...