Unique longitudinal probabilistic expectations data from the Berea Panel Study, which cover both the college and early post-college periods, are used to examine young adults' beliefs about their future incomes. We introduce a new measure of the ex post accuracy of beliefs, and two new approaches...

We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions in the spirit of the contingent...

Unique new data from a college with a mandatory work-study program are used to examine the relationship between working during school and academic performance. Particular attention is paid to the importance of biases that are potentially present because the number of hours that are worked is...

Researchers have long been interested in understanding why a Strong relationship between family income and educational attainment exists at virtually all levels of schooling. In part due to a recent increase in the disparity between the wages of college graduates and the wages of individuals...

We use novel data to show that the beauty wage premium exists only in jobs where attractiveness is plausibly a productive characteristic. A large premium exists in jobs that require substantial amounts of interpersonal interaction, but no such premium exists in jobs that require working with...

This paper studies wage determination using the first longitudinal dataset containing joblevel task information for individual workers. Novel quantitative task measures detail the amount of time spent performing People, Information, and Objects tasks at different skill levels. These measures...