This paper estimates future adult earnings effects associated with a universal pre-K program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These informed projections help to compensate for the lack of long-term data on universal pre-K programs, while using metrics that relate test scores to valued social benefits. Combining testscore data from the fall of 2006 and recent findings by Chetty et al. (forthcoming) on the re...

This paper studies the effects of the earnings test on retirement behavior. The earnings tests of most social security systems tax post-retirement earnings at a relatively high level and do not lead to actuarially fair increases in future benefits. This results in discouragement of partial retirement. The paper shows that a reduction in the earnings test's tax rate is likely to increase part-ti...

Forecasts of the financial status of Social Security's Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs and forecasts of the effects of various OASDI policy options on Americans would be improved if information about the earnings and labor force behavior of various population subgroups were included in projection models. Focusing on the projection of immigrant earnings, this articl...

Changes in the Structure of Earnings During the Polish Transition We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private sector with much higher wage inequ...

This paper looks at longitudinal aspects of changes in Italian male earnings inequality since the late 1970s by decomposing the earnings autocovariance structure into its persistent and transitory parts. Cross-sectional earnings differentials are found to grow over the period. The longitudinal analysis shows that such growth is determined by the permanent earnings component and is due both to a...

Analysts often provide forecasts of one-year ahead earnings, earnings two-year ahead, as well as long-term earnings growth rates. In our attempts to understand the properties of these contemporaneous multi-period earnings forecasts, we begin by examining whether analysts’ earnings forecasts can be described using the linear information dynamics (LID). We find that LID is an appropriate descript...

This paper examines business cycle variation in the earnings-returns relation. Earnings are more persistent when growth rates are high (i.e., in an expansion) than when growth rates are low (i.e., in a recession). Earnings are more persistent when production is high (i.e., in a credit crunch period) than when production is low (i.e., in a reliquification period). Relatedly, earnings response co...