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...

This paper examines whether local labor market conditions at the time of high school graduation have long-term effects on wages. We find that a higher unemployment rate raises the probability of staying in school after finishing high school of white males, but reduces that of black males. A...

I use economic theory and estimates of a semiparametrically identied structural model to analyze the role played by credit constraints, uncertainty and preferences in explaining college attendance. A methodology for inferring information available to the agent from individual choices is proposed...

Due primarily to the difficulty of obtaining ideal data, much remains unknown about how college majors are determined. We take advantage of longitudinal expectations data from the Berea Panel Study to provide new evidence about this issue, paying particular attention to the choice of whether to...

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they exhibit a strong secular trend. Three...

When receiving information about an imminent plant closure of mass layoffs, workers search for new jobs. This has been the premise of advance notice legislation, but has been difficult to verify using survey data. In this paper, we lay out a search model that takes explicitly into account the...

Issues related to the schooling attainment of children from low income families arise frequently in current education policy debates. In part due to a recent increase in the disparity between the wages of college graduates and the wages of individuals with less than a college degree, there has...

Motivated by the reality that the bene?ts of diversity on a college campus will be mitigated if interracial interactions are scarce or super?cial, previous work has strived to document the amount of interracial friendship interaction and to examine whether policy can influence this amount. In...

This paper complements the work of Sacerdote (1999) and Zimmerman (1999) by examining peer effects in a context where many students are from the types of disadvantaged backgrounds that are often the focus of education policy. The paper finds strong evidence of peer effects for females and...

We compare earnings inequality and mobility across the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. during the late 1990s. A flexible model of earnings dynamics that isolates positional mobility within a stable earnings distribution is estimated. Earnings trajectories are then simulated, and...