We have recently initiated the Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE) in an effort to learn how Americans perceive their near-term futures. This paper use SEE data on over two thousand labor force participants interviewed in 1994 and 1995 to describe how Americans in the labor force perceive the...

This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing cross section variability of earnings into components that are forecastable at the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity) and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variability in returns to schooling is...