I use the American Community Survey to examine how college earnings premiums differ across small metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. I document that the West North Central Division (Plains Region) has especially low average college earnings premiums. Controlling for observable MSA...

This paper examines how college students in the United States altered their college major decisions during the energy boom and bust of the 1970s and 1980s. We focus on petroleum engineering and geology, two majors closely related to the energy industry. We find strong evidence that the energy...

The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey is an initiative of the World Bank in cooperation with other development partners and nongovernmental agencies and carried out in more than 14 countries globally. In Ghana, the first phase of the survey focusing on adults in urban...

"The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey is an initiative of the World Bank in cooperation with other development partners and nongovernmental agencies and carried out in more than 14 countries globally. In Ghana, the first phase of the survey focusing on adults in urban...

We investigate whether the degree production and research and development (R&D) activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital present in the metropolitan areas where the institutions are located. We find that degree production has only a small...

The effects of inequality on economic growth depend on several factors. On one hand, they depend on the time horizon considered, on the initial level of income and on its initial distribution. But, on the other hand, as growth and inequality are also uneven across space, it also seems relevant...

We investigate whether the degree production and R&D activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital in the metropolitan areas where they are located. Our results indicate only a small positive relationship exists between a metropolitan area’s...

Much of the inequality literature has done a great deal of work to study national inequality. However, most people live in cities and their experience of inequality is shaped by their local and metropolitan environment. This fact implies that next to inequality in countries, local inequality is...

Previous studies often interpret the positive impact of high-skill human capital on the mean wages of low-skill workers as evidence of human capital externalities. We uncover a distributional wage effect that is difficult to reconcile with standard models of human capital externalities:...