The authors trace the origins of the key features of U.S. higher education today--the coexistence of small liberal arts colleges and large research universities; the substantial share of enrollment in the public sector; and varying levels of support provided by the states. These features began...

Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor's degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the narrowing of the gender gap in college and...

Over the past three decades, much research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. The authors reach two main conclusions about this body of work. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the past thirty years. A framework emerged that...

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest-growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of...

This paper shows that participation in crime and involvement with the criminal justice system has reached extraordinary levels among young men. With approximately 2 percent as many men incarcerated as in the labor force, the crime rate should have plummeted. It didn't. Evidence suggests that the...

The economic troubles of less-skilled workers in the United States. and OECD-Europe during a period of rising manufacturing imports from third world countries has created a debate about whether, in a global economy, wages or employment are determined by the global rather than domestic...

This paper contrasts the job market in economics with the job market in physics and mathematics, which attract students who are, by conventional measures, smarter than economists and where the base of knowledge is better established than ours. Despite this, economists earn more and have better...

The policy debate over globalization in the past decade has largely bypassed the international mobility of labor. Restrict trade and cries of protectionism resound. Suggest linking labor standards to trade and it's protectionism in disguise. Limit capital flows and the International Monetary...

This paper describes the contribution of David Card, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, to economics and the new empiricism that has become such an important part of the profession. Card's forte is creative and careful empirical scholarship that exploits modern computerized data sets with...