We ask whether employer learning in the wage-setting process depends on skill type and skill importance to productivity, using measures of seven premarket skills and data for each skill’s importance to occupation-specific productivity. Before incorporating importance measures, we find...

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate wage models in which college-educated workers are classified according to their degree attainment, college type, and college transfer status. The detailed taxonomy produces modest improvements in explanatory power...

Researchers often identify degree effects by including degree attainment (D) and years of schooling (S) in a wage model, yet the source of independent variation in these measures is not well understood. We argue that S is negatively correlated with ability among degree-holders because the most...

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth reveal that 35 percent of white men who leave school between 1979 and 1988 return to school by 1989. This paper examines the wage effects of these nontraditional enrollment patterns. I estimate a wage model which allows individuals to follow a...

We investigate whether the "match" between student ability and college quality is an important determinant of college graduation rates. We jointly estimate a multinomial probit model of college attendance decisions in which the alternatives are no college and attendance at college in four...