Previous measures of the incidence of public investment in higher education focus on the transfer to public college students. This implies that the net benefits to students who do not attend public colleges is negative. However, they miss potential general equilibrium effects on the private...

Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the 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,...

We develop a general equilibrium model of the market for undergraduate higher education that captures the coexistence of public and private colleges, the large degree of quality differentiation among them, and the tuition and admission policies that emerge from their competition for students....

The U.S. college wage premium doubles over the life cycle, from 27 percent at age 25 to 60 percent at age 55. Using a panel survey of workers followed through age 60, I show that growth in the college wage premium is primarily explained by occupational sorting. Shortly after graduating, workers...

We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. All else equal,...

Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in "last place" undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone "beneath" them. In laboratory experiments, we find...

Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian...

We develop an international financial market model in which domestic and foreign residents differ in their beliefs about the information content in public signals. We determine how informational advantages by domestic investors in the interpretation of home public signals impact equity markets....

U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization of inequality due to brute...