Search Results
How Important Is Instructional Spending to College Students’ Future Earnings?
Do colleges that invest more in instructional spending—on faculty, libraries, science labs—offer an education that translates into higher earnings for students?
Are Higher Child Care Wages Affecting the Labor Supply?
An analysis suggests that a rebound in labor force participation among women with a partner and child could have been stronger during the pandemic if not dampened by child care costs.
Working Paper
Lifetime Work Hours and the Evolution of the Gender Wage Gap
The gender wage gap expanded between 1940 and 1975 but narrowed sharply between 1980 and 1995. We use a human capital accumulation model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life-cycle profiles of market time and occupation sorting in explaining the gender wage gap dynamics over the long run. Men’s aggregate hours profiles changed little across cohorts, but women’s profiles converged to those of men, and especially so in higher-paying occupations. We calibrate the model to wage data by age, year, gender and occupation, and find that changing time ...
Seeking and Giving Advice
When she entered college, Senior Economist Oksana Leukhina aspired to become an international diplomat. Her plans changed after she received a piece of timely advice.
Working Paper
The Evolution of Lifetime Hours and the Gender Wage Gap
The gender wage gap decreased (opened) from 1940 to 1975 and then increased (closed) until 2010. We use the model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life cycle profiles of market time in explaining this dynamics. Men's profiles changed little across cohorts, but women's profiles converged to that of men implying, eventually, stronger incentives for women to accumulate human capital. We calibrate the model and find that (1) The 1940-75 decrease of the gap was because men valued human capital more than women due to their working more. The 1975-10 ...
What Are the Trade-offs of Meritocratic College Admissions?
St. Louis Fed research suggests that removing certain constraints in college admission standards and higher-education funding could boost entry and graduation rates and earnings.
Journal Article
The Changing Role of Family Income in College Selection and Beyond
Previous literature has established that the role of family income has grown substantially at predicting college entry decisions when comparing the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (e.g., Belley and Lochner (2007)). In this article, I further examine the changing role of family income as a determinant of college quality choice, degree attainment, and post-schooling earnings. I document that the role of family income has remained important and relatively stable at explaining college quality choice, its importance increasing only for the choice of four- over two-year ...
Working Paper
Lifetime Work Hours and the Evolution of the Gender Wage Gap
The gender wage gap expanded from 1940 and 1975 but narrowed sharply from 1980 to 1995. We use the model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life cycle profiles of market time in explaining the gender wage gap dynamics over the long run. Men’s profiles changed little across cohorts, but women’s profiles converged to those of men, and especially so in higher-paying occupations. We calibrate the model and find that the implied trends in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation account for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics. The ...
Working Paper
Imperfect Information Transmission from Banks to Investors: Macroeconomic Implications
Our goal is to elucidate the interaction of banks' screening effort and strategic information production in loan-backed asset markets using a general equilibrium framework. Asset quality is unobserved by investors, but banks may purchase error-prone ratings. The premium paid on highly rated assets emerges as the main determinant of banks' screening effort. The fact that rating strategies reflect banks' private information about asset quality helps keep this premium high. Conventional regulatory policies interfere with this decision margin, thereby reducing signaling value of high ratings and ...
Working Paper
Home Production and Leisure During the COVID-19 Recession
Between the months of February and April of 2020, average weekly market hours dropped by 6.25, meanwhile 35% of commuting workers reported switching to remote work arrangements. In this paper, we examine implications of these changes for the time allocation of different households, and on aggregate. We estimate that home production activity increased by 2.1 hours a week, or 34% of lost market hours, whereas leisure activity increased by 3.8 hours a week. The monthly value of home production increased by $30.83 billion – that is 10.5% of the concurrent $292.61 billion drop in monthly GDP. ...