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...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...

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...

Many of the world's major cities have attracted a flurry of out-of-town (OOT) home buyers. Such capital inflows affect house prices, rents, construction, labor income, wealth, and ultimately welfare. We develop an equilibrium model, calibrated to the typical U.S. metropolitan area, to quantify...

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...

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...