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Working Paper
House price growth when kids are teenagers: a path to higher intergenerational achievement?
This paper examines whether rising house prices immediately prior to children entering their college years impacts their intergenerational earnings mobility and/or educational outcomes. Higher house prices provide homeowners, especially liquidity constrained ones, with additional funding to invest in their children's human capital. The results show that a 1 percentage point increase in house prices, when children are 17-years-old, results in roughly 0.8 percent higher annual income for the children of homeowners, and 1.2 percent lower annual income for the children of renters. Additional ...
Journal Article
From the classroom to the workplace. So where are the jobs?
Journal Article
The college wage premium
The return on educational investments has risen substantially in the past 30 years. While the primary focus has been on the college wage premium, new evidence shows that the value of going to college is affected by a host of other important educational decisions, each of which has a potentially large effect on future earnings. This Commentary examines the impact of two of these other decisions on earnings: the choice of a college major and the pursuit of an advanced degree. In some cases, differences in the college major premium are as large as the college wage premium itself.
Working Paper
On the distribution of college dropouts: household wealth and uninsurable idiosyncratic risk
This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they reevaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may find it optimal to drop out and join the workforce without completing an undergraduate degree. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are more apt to drop out earlier than are ...
Speech
The national and regional economy
Remarks at Queens College, Flushing, New York.
Speech
The national and regional economic outlook
Remarks at the University at Albany, Albany, New York.
Journal Article
What flattened the earnings profile of recent college graduates?
Over their working lifetimes, college graduates who entered the workforce many decades ago experienced a greater increase in wages than more-recent college graduates.
Journal Article
High returns: public investment in higher education
Conservatively speaking, a college graduate generates $142,000 in state fiscal benefits over time while costing a state only $60,500. But trends in higher education allocations (4.1 percent of total state spending nationwide in 1984; 1.8 percent in 2004) suggest states have become shortsighted.
Report
College major choice and the gender gap
Males and females are markedly different in their choice of college major. Two main reasons have been suggested for the gender gap: differences in innate abilities and differences in preferences. This paper addresses the question of how college majors are chosen, focusing on the underlying gender gap. Since observed choices may be consistent with many combinations of expectations and preferences, I use a unique data set of Northwestern University sophomores that contains the students' subjective expectations about choice-specific outcomes. I estimate a choice model where selection of college ...
Journal Article
College completion gaps between blacks and whites: what accounts for regional differences
The educational gap between blacks and whites in the United States is wide and widening at the college graduate level. A less known fact is that the size of this gap differs across the various regions of the country. The difference is especially great for the Northeast, an area known for high average educational achievement. ; This paper explores the reasons for the differential college completion gaps by race across regions, focusing chiefly on adults between the ages of 25 and 34. Two hypotheses are explored. One is that differential incidence by region of factors determining access to a ...