This paper uses a unique natural experiment to investigate the sensitivity of American college women’s contraceptive choice and sexual behavior to the price of prescription birth control. With the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Congress inadvertently and unexpectedly increased...

We investigate how high school instruction in certain subjects is related to academic performance in college in the same courses. We find that high school exposure has only a mild association with college grades after controlling for academic, demographic, and individual-level variables. We...

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades...

We conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches—a distributional approach and a causal parameter...

We conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches—a distributional approach and a causal parameter...

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state....

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn,...

This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the...

This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in per capita earnings. However, these areas also experience...

This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in earnings per capita. However, these areas also experience...