This paper applies functional regression to precise geo-coded register data to measure productivity spillovers from high-skilled workers. We use a smoothing splines estimator to model the spatial distribution of high-skilled workers as continuous curves. Our rich panel data allows us to address...

Economics has been shown to be a relatively high earning college major, but geographic differences in earnings have been largely overlooked. This paper uses the American Community Survey to examine geographic differences in both absolute earnings and relative earnings for economic majors. We...

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that "the return to schooling" is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic - a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be...

Income levels are higher in cities. The evidence for the income gap between urban and rural areas is overwhelming, but the agglomeration effect is hard to identify. Recent advances make use of individual level data to separate out sorting and instrumentation to handle the endogeneity of...

How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor force participants. We show that...