This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 6 percentage points in the college premium. We show that although a standard demand and supply framework can...

We study how class size and composition affect the academic and labor market performances of college students, two crucial policy questions given the secular increase in college enrollment. We rely on the random assignment of students to teaching classes. Our results suggest that a one standard...

This paper examines gender discrimination in the Australian graduate labour market, using data from the Graduate Destination Surveys 1999-2009. A framework of analysis provided by the overeducation/required education/undereducation literature is applied. A smaller gender wage gap is found for...

Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both...

The paper investigates the gender wage gap among recently graduated people, controlling for job and academic variables and for the field of study, as women lag in highly remunerative majors. The raw gender gap in hourly wages is 5.6%. Although including academic variables and the field of study,...

Using records from a large public university, we examine the impact of Greek life on academic performance and salaries. To isolate the causal effect of Greek life, we exploit a university policy prohibiting students from joining a Greek organization during their first semester and a minimum GPA...

Although the share of female PhDs has increased explosively since the 1980s, little research has focused on the utilisation and remuneration of female versus male scientific human capital. Using rich Swedish cross-sectional register data on the stock of PhDs in 2004, this paper analyses to what...

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a...

We study the relative labour market wage outcomes of university graduates in the UK using the Labour Force Survey (LFS), matched to mean standardised admission scores at the institution *subject* cohort level using data on high school achievement scores of students admitted to these courses....

The Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 changed the Higher Education system in the UK by giving all polytechnics university status. Using the British Household Panel Survey and accounting for different sources of selection bias, we show that wage differentials between university and...