This paper incorporates an explicit education signaling mechanism into a dynamic model of production and asks if "higher education as a signal" helps explain the simultaneous increase in the supply and price of skilled relative to unskilled labor, as is observed in the US since 1980. The key...

The main questions of this paper are as follows: Whether and to what extent does rising educational attainment contribute to a country's economic growth by facilitating the reallocation of labor from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sector? The transition from the agricultural...

This paper provides a framework within which to study the equilibrium impact of alternative policies. We develop an overlapping generation, life-cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices. Education and crime depend on different dimensions of heterogeneity, which takes the form of...

College attainment differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper shows that highly educated states employ skill-biased technologies, specialize in skill-intensive industries, but do not pay lower skill premia. A theory based on agglomeration economies is developed to account for these...

In this study we summarize the main trends in the earnings and employment distribution for the US during the last four decades using data drawn from the March CPS. Our aim is to state the facts in a simple descriptive way , which then enables the readers to formulate their own judgment on how...