Interstate migration has decreased steadily since the 1980s. We show that this trend is not primarily related to demographic and socioeconomic factors, but instead appears to be connected to a concurrent secular decline in labor market transitions. We explore a number of reasons for the declines...

We review patterns in migration within the US over the past thirty years. Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of...

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality using two additional decades of data and far greater variation in minimum wages than was available to earlier studies. We argue that prior literature suffers from two sources of bias and propose an IV strategy...

Our paper analyzes historical data for New York State on the percentagee of school budget proposals that are defeated each year and panel data that we have collected on budget vote success for indvidual school districts in the state. We find that changes in state aid matter, but not as much as...

Within many large states there are multiple 2-year and 4-year public institutions. Our paper develops a methodology that can be used to help evaluate how well each 2-year public institution in a state is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to 4-year public institutions to...

Private research universities differ in the shares of their annual giving coming from different sources (alumni, other individuals, foundations, corporations) and the shares of their annual giving applied to different uses (current operations, buildings and equipment, enhancing their...

We confront two seemingly-contradictory observations about the US labor market: the rate at which workers change employers has declined since the 1980s, yet there is a commonly expressed view that long-term employment relationships are more difficult to attain. We reconcile these observations by...

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school...

In this paper we use restricted access administrative data from the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates to investigate the effect of the MMUF on PhD completions by underrepresented minority students who graduate from participating institutions. We...

We study the adoption of Common Application membership by private four-year postsecondary institutions and its role in explaining the growth in undergraduate applications. Using data from the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges, our estimation of proportional hazard models suggest that...