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Keywords:human capital 

Working Paper
Firms as Learning Environments: Implications for Earnings Dynamics and Job Search

This paper demonstrates that heterogeneity in firms’ promotion of human capital accumulation is an important determinant of life-cycle earnings inequality. I use administrative micro data from Germany to show that different establishments offer systematically different earnings growth rates for their workers. This observation suggests that that the increase in inequality over the life cycle reflects not only inherent worker variation, but also differences in the firms that workers happen to match with over their lifetimes. To quantify this channel, I develop a life-cycle search model with ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-036

Journal Article
Confronting Challenges, Exploring Solutions

In order to strengthen our economy in ways that enable greater economic mobility and prosperity, we must invest in opportunity. By investing in opportunity, we have the ability to empower people to build wealth and create value, to foster revitalization and promote resiliency in places that have experienced disinvestment, to invigorate civic engagement, and to mitigate the risks that poverty presents to our economic system. We are excited to explore ways to invest in opportunity both in this publication and throughout the 2018 Reinventing Our Communities conference
Cascade , Volume 3

Working Paper
The Optimal Taxation of Business Owners

Business owners in the United States are disproportionately represented among the wealthy and are exposed to substantial idiosyncratic risk. Further, recent evidence indicates that business income primarily reflects returns to the human capital of the owner. Motivated by these facts, this paper characterizes stationary efficient allocations and optimal linear taxes on income and wealth when business income depends on innate ability, luck, and the past effort of the owner. I first show that in stationary efficient allocations, more productive entrepreneurs typically bear more risk and the ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-26R

Discussion Paper
Staying In College Longer Than Four Years Costs More Than You Might Think

In yesterday’s blog post and in our recent article in the New York Fed’s Current Issues series, we showed that the economic benefits of a bachelor’s degree still outweigh the costs, on average, even in today’s difficult labor market. Like others who assess the value of a bachelor’s degree, we base our estimates on the assumption that a student takes four years to finish the degree. But it is not uncommon for people to take longer than that. In fact, recent data indicate that among those who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years, only about two-thirds finish in four years ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20140903

Journal Article
Econ Focus: Why Don't More Young People Buy Stocks?

Standard life-cycle models of portfolio choice suggest that individuals should participate in the stock market throughout their lives. Yet the data show that this is not typically the case early in life. Rather, there is a pattern of high human capital investment (that is, acquiring skills that the labor market values) and low stock market participation in youth, a pattern that reverses as individuals age.
Econ Focus , Issue 2Q , Pages 29

Working Paper
Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?

The earnings of workers are reduced for many years after being displaced from their jobs, and those workers and their families face increased risk of other problems as well. The ills suffered by displaced workers motivated several recent expansions of government programs, including the unemployment insurance system, and have spurred calls for wage insurance that would provide longerrun earnings replacement. However, while the magnitude of the losses is relatively clear, the theory of why displacement matters is scattered and somewhat undeveloped. Much of the policy discussion appears to ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1405

Report
Human capital and economic activity in urban America

We examine the relationship between human capital and economic activity in U.S. metropolitan areas, extending the literature in two ways. First, we utilize new data on metropolitan area GDP to measure economic activity. Results show that a one-percentage-point increase in the proportion of residents with a college degree is associated with about a 2 percent increase in metropolitan area GDP per capita. Second, we develop measures of human capital that reflect the types of knowledge within U.S. metropolitan areas. Regional knowledge stocks related to the provision of producer services and ...
Staff Reports , Paper 332

Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs and the Financial Incentives for Career Advancement: A Case Study of the Health Care Services Career Pathway

Benefits cliffs, which occur when earnings gains are offset by the loss of public benefits, have long been recognized to create financial disincentives for low-income individuals to earn more income. In this paper, the authors develop a new methodology to study benefits cliffs in the context of career advancement. The authors illustrate the change in net financial resources for an individual pursuing the health care services career pathway from certified nursing assistant (CNA) to licensed practical nurse (LPN) to registered nurse (RN). Accounting for increases in taxes and the loss of public ...
FRB Atlanta Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper , Paper 2020-1

Working Paper
Gender Gap

We employ the Ben-Porath (1967) human capital model to study the evolution of the gender wage gap over the long run. We consider the effect of changing lifecycle profiles of female market hours. We find that the implied response in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation accounts for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics. This finding is consistent with the labor economists’ view that changing selection on unobservables played a critical role in the gender wage gap dynamics. Our contribution is to make explicit and quantify the link between market hours and (unobserved) ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-025

Working Paper
Causes and Consequences of Student-College Mismatch

College admissions are highly meritocratic in the U.S. today. It is not the case in many other countries. What is the tradeoff? On one hand, meritocracy produces more human capital overall if higher ability students learn more in college and if they learn more in higher quality colleges. This leads to a higher overall level of earnings (i.e. greater efficiency, loosely speaking). On the other hand, more meritocracy generates a higher degree of earnings inequality. In this paper, we quantify this efficiency-equality tradeoff. Our results suggest small efficiency losses/gains from student ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-026

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Abel, Jaison R. 7 items

Leukhina, Oksana 7 items

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