This paper tests the hypothesis that compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between the years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school start age created by children's date of birth provides a...

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model...

This paper tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much microeconometric evidence suggest that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries. At a...

This paper uses job applications- data to test the existence of non-competitive, ex-ante rents in the labor market. We first examine whether jobs that pay the legal minimum wage face an excessively of labor as measured by the number of job applications received for the most recent positions...

We conduct a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the United States, integrating data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Survey of Consumer Finances. In order to understand how different...

This paper examines the effect of technological change and other factors on the relative demand for workers with different education levels and on the recent growth of U.S. educational wage differentials. A simple supply-demand framework is used to interpret changes in the relative quantities,...

Improvement in human capital is often presumed important for state economic development, but little research links better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of worker skills in each state that incorporate cognitive skills from state- and country-of-origin achievement tests....

We investigate the welfare consequences of the stark increase in wage and earnings inequality in the US over the last 30 years. Our data stems from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is the only US data set that contains information on wages, hours worked, earnings and consumption for the...

The average wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. Much of this convergence is attributable to a relative increase in the rate of return to schooling among black workers. It is widely argued that the growth in the relative return to...

This paper examines whether employees who use a computer at work earn a higher wage rate than otherwise similar workers who do not use a computer at work. The analysis primarily relies on data from the Current Population Survey and the High School and Beyond Survey. A variety of statistical...