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Working Paper
The Income-Achievement Gap and Adult Outcome Inequality
Nielsen, Eric R. (2015-05-14)
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

Discussion Paper
College May Not Pay Off for Everyone
Abel, Jaison R.; Deitz, Richard (2014-09-04)
In our recent Current Issues article and blog post on the value of a college degree, we showed that the economic benefits of a bachelor’s degree still far outweigh the costs. However, this does not mean that college is a good investment for everyone. Our work, like the work of many others who come to a similar conclusion, is based in large part on the empirical observation that the average wages of college graduates are significantly higher than the average wages of those with only a high school diploma. However, not all college students come from Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20140904b

Why Human Capital Matters Why Human Capital Matters
Monge-Naranjo, Alexander (2020-10-13)
An economist at the St. Louis Fed discusses the growing importance of human capital in determining a nation’s income.
On the Economy

Working Paper
Heterogeneous Agents Dynamic Spatial General Equilibrium
Dvorkin, Maximiliano (2023-03-22)
I develop a dynamic model of migration and labor market choice with incomplete markets and uninsurable income risk to quantify the effects of international trade on workers’ employment reallocation, earnings, and wealth. Macroeconomic conditions in different labor markets and idiosyncratic shocks shape agents’ labor market choices, consumption, earnings, and asset accumulation over time. Despite the rich heterogeneity, the model is highly tractable as the optimal consumption, labor supply, capital accumulation, and migration and reallocation decisions of individual workers across ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-005

Report
The Limited Role of Intergenerational Transfers for Understanding Racial Wealth Disparities
Sabelhaus, John Edward; Thompson, Jeffrey P. (2023-03-07)
Transfers of wealth between generations—whether through inheritances or inter vivos gifts—are less important in explaining racial disparities in wealth than might be expected. While this factor looms large in the media’s discussions of racial inequality, it explains relatively little of the disparities evident in the data. One reason is that most people, regardless of race, receive no inheritance or other transfer of substantial value. In addition, most recipients of inheritances ultimately consume those bequests and do not plan to leave substantial gifts to their offspring. Further, ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Discussion Paper
When College Might Not Be Worth It
Abel, Jaison R.; Deitz, Richard (2025-04-16)
In our last post, we showed that the economic benefits of a college degree still far outweigh the costs for the typical graduate, with a healthy and consistent return of 12 to 13 percent over the past few decades. But there are many circumstances under which college graduates do not earn such a high return. Some colleges are much more expensive than average, and financial aid is not guaranteed no matter which college a student attends. In addition, the potentially high cost of living on campus was not factored into our estimates. Some students also may take five or six years to finish their ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20250416b

Working Paper
Lifetime Work Hours and the Evolution of the Gender Wage Gap
Leukhina, Oksana; Vandenbroucke, Guillaume (2025-02-03)
The gender wage gap expanded between 1940 and 1975 but narrowed sharply between 1980 and 1995. We use a human capital accumulation model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life-cycle profiles of market time and occupation sorting in explaining the gender wage gap dynamics over the long run. Men’s aggregate hours profiles changed little across cohorts, but women’s profiles converged to those of men, and especially so in higher-paying occupations. We calibrate the model to wage data by age, year, gender and occupation, and find that changing time ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-025

Journal Article
Research Spotlight: Skill Mismatch, Layoffs, and Bouncing Back
Hansbrough, Brooke (2024-08-13)
Being laid off from one's job often leads to worse future employment outcomes. The underlying reasons for this are unclear, however. Recent research by Richmond Fed Economist Claudia Macaluso has found that mismatch between a laid-off worker's skills and the skills involved in other local jobs plays a significant role. She created a novel measurement of "local skill remoteness" and used it to compare the effects of layoffs from jobs with varying levels of this skill remoteness on a worker's wages, future employment, and migration.
Econ Focus , Volume 24 , Issue 3Q , Pages 27

Working Paper
Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?
Fallick, Bruce; Carrington, William J. (2014-06-02)
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
Do colleges and universities increase their region's human capital?
Abel, Jaison R.; Deitz, Richard (2009-10-01)
We investigate whether the degree production and research and development (R&D) activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital present in the metropolitan areas where the institutions are located. We find that degree production has only a small positive relationship with local stocks of human capital, suggesting that migration plays an important role in the geographic distribution of human capital. Moreover, we show that spillovers from academic R&D activities tilt the structure of local labor markets toward occupations requiring innovation and ...
Staff Reports , Paper 401

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