eginning with the important work of Murphy and Welch (1992), a great deal of recent research has attempted to document and explain the dramatic changes in the wage distribution that occurred during the 1980s (see also Katz and Murphy 1992). Practically every income group faced a decline in real wages during the 1980s. However, workers at the 33rd percentile experienced a 14 percent drop in the ...

The gap between the rich and the poor is rising. During the past 30 years, this difference has been especially pronounced between college graduates and non-college graduates. The ratio of skilled (college educated) wages to unskilled (non-college graduate) wages is called the skill premium, and it has also increased over the past 30 years. The increase in the skill premium has continued despite...

BACKGROUND There are large differences in life expectancy by educational attainment in the United States. Previous research has found obesity's contribution to these differences to be small. Those findings may be sensitive to how obesity is estimated. METHODS This analysis uses discrete-time logistic regressions with data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), poo...

We document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model with skilland sector-biased technical change. Finding the model’s parameters through a combination of estimation and calibration, we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1961 and 2009, along with the increase in college attain...

Our analysis of migration differs from previous research in three important aspects. First, we exploit the confidential geocoding in the NLSY79 to obtain a distance-based measure. Second, we let the effect of migration on wage growth differ by schooling level. Third, we use propensity score matching to address selection issues. An economic model helps us determine the variables included in the ...

This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate quantile treatment effects of college quality on earnings. We proxy college quality using the college sector from which students graduate and focus on identifying how graduating from UT-Austin, Texas A&M or a community college affects the distribution of earnings relative to graduating from a non-flagship unive...

Whether highly educated women are exiting the labor force to care for their children has generated a great deal of media attention, even though academic studies find little evidence of opting out. This paper shows that female graduates of elite institutions have lower labor market involvement than their counterparts from less selective institutions. Although elite graduates are more likely to e...

Sex, Race, and Job Satisfaction among Highly Educated Workers* There has been a considerable amount of work focusing on job satisfaction and sex, generally finding that women are more satisfied than men despite having objectively worse job conditions. But there is little evidence on whether job satisfaction differs by race or ethnicity. We use data from the 2010 National Survey of College Gradu...