Top income inequality in the United States has increased considerably within occupations. This phenomenon has led to a search for a common explanation. We instead develop a theory where increases in income inequality originating within a few occupations can "spill over" through consumption into...

Heathcote et al. (2010) conducted an empirical analysis of several dimensions of inequality in the United States over the years 1967-2006, using publicly-available survey data. This paper expands the analysis, and extends it to 2021. We find that since the early 2000s, the college wage premium...

We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2...

We review research on the dynamics and distribution of individual earnings and family income. We start with univariate earnings models, which dominate the literature and are often used as the exogenous component of family income in structural models of saving. We present a version of the linear...

We examine the small sample properties of the GMM estimator for models of covariance structures, where the technique is often referred to as the optimal minimum distance (OMD) estimator. We present a variety of Monte Carlo experiments based on simulated data and on the data used by Abowd and...

For birth cohorts 1935-44, 1945-62, and 1964-74, we estimate the contribution of education; permanent heterogeneity in wage rates, employment, and hours; labor market shocks; spouse characteristics and shocks; nonlabor income shocks; and marital histories to the age profiles of the variance of...

We estimate causal effects of 121 graduate degrees on log earnings. The returns average 0.159 but vary widely across fields, with a standard deviation of 0.176. Experience profiles of the returns also vary and are particularly steep for medicine. Internal rates of return, which account for...

Using a dynamic linear equation that has a conditionally homoskedastic moving average disturbance, we compare two parameterizations of a commonly used instrumental variables estimator (Hansen (1982)) to one that is asymptotically optimal in a class of estimators that includes the conventional...

Many recent theoretical papers have come under attack for modeling prices as Geometric Brownian Motion. This process can diverge over time, implying that firms facing this price process can earn infinite profits. We explore the significance of this attack and contrast investment under Geometric...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of estimating distributed lags in short panels. Estimates of the parameter of distributed lag relationships based on single time-series of observations have been usually rather imprecise. The promise of panel data in this context is in the N repetitions...