Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:I24 

Working Paper
The Pathway to Enrolling in a High-Performance High School: Understanding Barriers to Access

In 2017, Chicago Public Schools adopted an online universal application system for all high schools with the hope of providing more equitable access to high-performance schools. Despite the new system, Black students and students living in low-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods remained less likely than their peers to enroll in a high-performance high school. In this paper, we characterize various constraints that students and families may face in enrolling in a high-performance high school including eligibility to programs based on prior academic achievement, distance from ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2020-32

Working Paper
Seven Economic Facts About the U.S. Racial Wealth Gap

Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances and the U.S. Census Bureau, along with data and research from other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the U.S. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership, education, access to credit, and retirement savings – all factors that contribute to a significant and persistent gap in net worth between households of different races and ethnicities, particularly between Black households and White households. While none of the economic factors listed fully explains the ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2022-32

Working Paper
Who Values Access to College?

A first glance at US data suggests that college -- given its mean returns and sharply subsidized cost for all enrollees -- could be of great value to most. Using an empirically-disciplined human capital model that allows for variation in college readiness, we show otherwise. While the top decile of valuations is indeed large (40 percent of consumption), nearly half of high school completers place zero value on access to college. Subsidies to college currently flow to those already best positioned to succeed and least sensitive to them. Even modestly targeted alternatives may therefore improve ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-015

Working Paper
The Income-Achievement Gap and Adult Outcome Inequality

This paper discusses various methods for assessing group differences in academic achievement using only the ordinal content of achievement test scores. Researchers and policymakers frequently draw conclusions about achievement differences between various populations using methods that rely on the cardinal comparability of test scores. This paper shows that such methods can lead to erroneous conclusions in an important application: measuring changes over time in the achievement gap between youth from high- and low-income households. Commonly-employed, cardinal methods suggest that this ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-41

Journal Article
Do Family Structure Differences Explain Trends in Wealth Differentials?

Race and ethnic wealth differentials are wide and increasing. Some of the gaps are associated with education differences, but education alone cannot account for the substantially higher net worth of White families than of Black and Hispanic families. As of 2013, the median wealth of Black college graduate families had fallen to only 13 percent of the median wealth of White families. One possible explanation is the significantly lower shares of married couple and married parent households among minorities. For example, even among college graduates, only 41 percent of Black family heads were ...
Review , Volume 99 , Issue 1 , Pages 85-101

Working Paper
House price growth when children are teenagers: a path to higher earnings?

The United States has a long history of promoting homeownership through the mortgage interest tax deduction, and home equity constitutes an important source of borrowing collateral. There is a sizable body of work studying how fluctuating house prices impact consumer behavior. Since college tuition costs pose a large financial burden for many U.S. families, access to housing equity may impact decisions about pursuing a post-secondary education. This paper adds to the literature by using MSA-level house-price variation and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the link between ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-13

Working Paper
The Covid-19 Pandemic Spurred Growth in Automation: What Does this Mean for Minority Workers?

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. While existing research has explored how automation may displace non-specialized jobs, there is typically less attention paid to how this displacement may interact with preexisting structural issues around racial inequality. This analysis updates that of a 2021 Brookings paper by the authors, finding that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2023-06

Report
The Effect of Constitutional Provisions on Education Policy and Outcomes

Education services in the United States are determined predominantly by non-market institutions, the rules of which are defined by state constitutions. This paper empirically examines the effect of changes in constitutional provisions on education outcomes in the United States. To show causal effects, we exploit discontinuities in the procedure for adopting constitutional amendments to compare outcomes when an amendment passed with those when an amendment failed. Our results show that adoption of an amendment results in higher per-pupil expenditure, higher teacher salaries, smaller class ...
Staff Report , Paper 623

Journal Article
The College Wealth Divide: Education and Inequality in America, 1956-2016

Using new long-run microdata, this article studies wealth and income trends of households with a college degree (college households) and without a college degree (noncollege households) in the United States since 1956. We document the emergence of a substantial college wealth premium since the 1980s, which is considerably larger than the college income premium. Over the past four decades, the wealth of college households has tripled. By contrast, the wealth of noncollege households has barely grown in real terms over the same period. Part of the rising wealth gap can be traced back to ...
Review , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , Pages 19-49

Journal Article
Explaining Black-White Differences in College Outcomes at Missouri Public Universities

Conditional on enrollment at a four-year public university, African American students are less likely to graduate and less likely to graduate with a STEM degree than White students. This article reports on evidence from Missouri showing that these outcome differences in college can be explained entirely by differences in students? academic preparation prior to college enrollment. While this result should not be taken to imply that college-level interventions cannot help to reduce observed college success gaps by race, it does point toward pre-college interventions as being better targeted at ...
Review , Volume 99 , Issue 1 , Pages 77-83

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

Bradbury, Katharine L. 5 items

Burke, Mary A. 4 items

Triest, Robert K. 4 items

Barrow, Lisa 3 items

Booth-Bell, Darlene 3 items

Broady, Kristen 3 items

show more (76)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

I28 10 items

D31 8 items

J15 8 items

I22 7 items

J24 7 items

show more (47)

FILTER BY Keywords

Inequality 7 items

Human capital 6 items

higher education 5 items

Education 4 items

Intergenerational mobility 3 items

segregation 3 items

show more (114)

PREVIOUS / NEXT