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How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental and quasi-experimental research designs have generated new insights on the importance of residential neighborhoods in childhood and adulthood. This paper summarizes the recent neighborhood effects literature and interprets the findings. Childhood neighborhoods affect long-run economic and educational outcomes in a manner consistent with exposure models of neighborhood effects. For adults, neighborhood environments matter for their health and well-being but have more ambiguous impacts on labor market outcomes. We discuss the evidence on the mechanisms behind the observed patterns and conclude by highlighting directions for future research.

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backwards and forwards. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers. Increased educational wage differentials explain 75 percent of the rise of U.S. wage inequality from 1980 to 2000 as compared to 38 percent for 2000 to 2017.

The share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements has increased substantially in recent decades. Micro longitudinal analyses show that unemployed workers are much more likely to transition into alternative work arrangements than other workers. Macro time-series evidence shows that weak labor market conditions lead to an increase in non-traditional work. But the estimated magnitudes imply that the Great Recession and high unemployment in the 2000s can account for only a modest part of the rise in alternative work. Secular factors associated with rising inequality and technological changes making it easier to contract out work appear to be the driving forces.

Roland Fryer has emerged during the last decade as a leading scholar of the US racial divide and as a major figure in the evaluation of education policies to narrow the racial achievement gap and improve the prospects of low-income and minority children. He has been bold and fearless in his willingness to apply rigorous economic theory, to collect new data, and to develop and implement appropriate and compelling empirical strategies (including randomized field experiments) to assess any serious hypothesis that might shed light on racial inequality and that may provide policy tools to improve the academic achievement and long-run outcomes of disadvantaged children. Fryer’s work is marked by a creative and entrepreneurial edge that has allowed him to carry out large-scale evaluations and interventions in the context of large school districts like New York, Chicago, Houston, and Dallas, often in the face of political opposition and bureaucratic inertia. His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the barriers to increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded. Fryer’s research output related to racial inequality, the US racial achievement gap, and the design and evaluation of educational policies make him a worthy recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal. He was born in Daytona Beach, Florida. His tumultuous childhood and youth experiences in Florida and Texas have been well-documented in a profile in the New York Times Magazine (Dubner 2005). Roland went on to earn his BA from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1998 and his PhD in economics from Pennsylvania State

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term outcomes. Higher-quality neighborhoods improve family safety, adult subjective well-being and health, and girls' mental health. But they have no detectable impact on youth human capital, labor market outcomes, or risky behaviors. In contrast, higher-quality schools can improve children's academic achievement and can have longer-term positive impacts of increasing educational attainment and earnings and reducing incarceration and teen pregnancy.

Among life’s most vital transitions are those concerning family and career. We decide when and whom to marry, how many children to have, whether to further our education, and which occupations and jobs to pursue. Fundamental aspects of these transitions began to change around the early 1970s for the college educated generally, and for women in particular. The median age at first marriage among college graduate women, which had been stable at about 22.5 years old from the 1950s to the early 1970s (for birth cohorts from the 1930s to about 1950), increased by 2.5 years between 1972 and 1979 (for birth cohorts from about 1950 to 1955). The fraction of women not having a first birth by around 40 years old increased from 20 percent for those graduating in the early 1960s, to 28 percent for those graduating in the 1970s. College graduate women greatly increased their education in professional schools; the fraction female among first-year law and medical school students, for example, was 10 percent in 1970 but rose to 40 percent by 1990.

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a large online job board. We find that a business bachelor's degree from a for-profit online institution is 22 percent less likely to receive a callback than one from a nonselective public institution. In applications to health jobs, we find that for-profit credentials receive fewer callbacks unless the job requires an external quality indicator such as an occupational license. (JEL I23, I26, J24, J44, J63, M51)

Economists devote considerable effort to grad­ u­ate stu­dent edu­cation bu­t have condu­cted rela­ tively little research on the determinants of stu­dent performance or placement in the job market. Do gradu­ate stu­dents who do well in core microeco­ nomics (micro) cou­rses also do well in core mac­ roeconomics (macro) and econometrics (metrics) cou­rses? Are stu­dents who achieve higher grades in their first­year core classes or general exams more likely to complete their PhD and obtain higher ranked positions in the job market? In an attempt to answer these qu­estions, we assem­ bled a rich dataset on 1,029 economics gradu­ate stu­dents who enrolled at Harvard University, Massachu­setts Institu­te of Technology (MIT), Princeton University, Stanford University, or the University of Chicago in the 1990s. These schools were selected becau­se, in 1993, they had the five highest ranked economics PhD programs, accord­ ing to the National Research Cou­ncil (NRC). Ou­r resu­lts indicate that stu­dents’ grades in requ­ired core cou­rses are highly correlated across su­bjects. The PhD admissions com­ mittee’s evalu­ation of a stu­dent predicts first­ year grades and PhD completion, bu­t not job placement. First­year performance is a strong What Does Performance in Graduate School Predict? Graduate Economics Education and Student Outcomes

We examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective public institutions. We find that colleges with a higher share of online students charge lower tuition prices. We present evidence of declining real and relative prices for full-time undergraduate online education from 2006 to 2013. Although the pattern of results suggests some hope that online technology can “bend the cost curve” in higher education, the impact of online learning on education quality remains uncertain.

The United States led all rich and industrialized countries in the establishment of mass secondary and higher education, and it led all in Europe by at least several decades for much of the 20th century. The U.S. advantage in the schooling of its young produced, by midcentury, large differences between the educational stock of its labor force and that of other rich countries, a result that would hardly be surprising except for the fact that the United States had absorbed millions of less-educated immigrants. Only in recent decades have many rich countries caught up to, and even exceeded, the United States in years of education for young persons. At the same time that the United States led the world in mass education in the 20th century, it rapidly expanded its economic lead. No single factor can account for the economic dominance of the United States in the 20th century, and most of the favored explanations, be they rooted in technological, institutional, or natural resource factors, are complementary ones. Despite that admonition, it would appear logical that part, possibly a major part, of the economic

Genuine change in the economic and social status of U.S. women did not emanate simply from their increased labor-force participation, but rather, from their increase in professions and as “career women.” Those changes first began in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We examine here one factor of momentous importance in this break with the past. The Economist (31 December 1999) recently named it the greatest science and technology advance in the twentieth century. It is the oral contraceptive, known worldwide by its moniker “the pill.” In 1960, 18.4 percent of professionals were women, as were 4.7 percent of “high-powered professionals.” By 1998, 36.4 percent of professionals and 25.1 percent of the high-powered subset were women. We explore in this article a series of connections that link the birth-control pill to the increase of women in professional occupations. Our evidence for the impact of the pill relies largely on the timing of various changes. Changes in laws giving minors certain adult rights and lowering the age of majority enabled young and unmarried women to obtain the pill. Young women’s control over their fertility directly reduced the costs to them of engaging in long-term career investments. The pill also served to increase the age at first marriage and thus indirectly reduced a potential penalty of delaying marriage to pursue professional education and training. All of these changes began in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The late 1960’s and early 1970’s were years of tumultuous social and political change. How can we separate the impacts of affirmative action, the resurgence of feminism, changes in social norms, and abortion reform from the impact of the pill? The simple answer is that the timing of several of these changes is far less convincing than is that of the pill in affecting career investment. But that is not the complete answer. The economic impact of the pill did not occur in isolation. Legal change made it possible for young women to obtain contraceptives. These changes, paradoxically, did not stem primarily from concerns regarding access to contraception. They were, instead, part of the larger political movement of the 1960’s. The pill, moreover, unleashed social change by enabling an increase in the age at first marriage. There is also no doubt that the rebirth of feminism, long in the making, served to complement and reinforce the pill’s impact. Our argument for the importance of the pill in affecting women’s career decisions relies on the correspondence among breaks in various time series and in the logic of the relationships among the pill, career, and marriage. We will begin with the time series on career and marriage, which can be viewed as the dependent variables. The evidence on the diffusion of the pill (the independent variable) is taken up next. The logic of our argument relating pill use, career, and marriage follows, and finally we present our defense for why we believe the pill packed considerable power in altering the social and economic status of American women.

U.S. macroeconomic evidence shows a negative relation between the rate of change of wages and unemployment. In contrast, most theories of wage determination imply a negative relation between the level of wages and unemployment. In this paper, we ask whether one can reconcile the empirical evidence with theoretical wage relations. We reach three main conclusions. First, we derive the condition under which the two can indeed be reconciled. We show the constraints that such a condition imposes on the determinants of workers' reservation wages as well as the relative importance of workers' outside options as opposed to match specific productivity in wage determination. Second, in the light of this condition, we reinterpret the presence of an "error correction" term in macroeconomic wage relations for most European economies but not in the United States. Third, we show that whether this condition holds or not has important implications for the effects of a number of variables -- from real interest rates to oil prices to payroll taxes -- on the natural rate of unemployment.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

The American university was shaped in a formative period from 1890 to 1940 long before the rise of federal funding, the G.I. Bill, and mass higher education. Both the scale and scope of institutions of higher education were greatly increased, the research university blossomed, states vastly increased their funding of higher education, and the public sector greatly expanded relative to the private sector. Independent professional institutions declined, as did theological institutes and denominational colleges in general. Increases in the scale and scope of institutions of higher education were generated by exogenous changes in the that affected the professions generally and that of the clergy in particular. The increase in the share of students in the public sector may also have been prompted by these exogenous changes for they gave advantages to institutions, such as those in the public sector, that had research facilities, reputation, and a long purse. The high school movement, which swept parts of the country from 1910 to 1940, brought students from less privileged backgrounds to college and thus also buoyed enrollments in the public sector. States differed widely in their funding of higher education per capita and we find that greater generosity in 1929 was positively associated with later statehood, lower private college enrollments in 1900, greater shares of employment in mining and manufacturing, higher income, and a proxy for greater and more equally distributed wealth.

Over the past three decades, a large amount of research has attempted to identify the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment. It is this body of work we assess in this paper. We reach two main conclusions. First, there has been considerable theoretical progress over the past 30 years. A framework has emerged. We present it, and show how it can be used to think for example about the relation between technological progrss and unemployment. Second, empirical knowledge lags behind. Economists do not have a good quantitative understanding of the determinants of the natural rate, either across time or across countries. We look at two issues, the relation of wages to unemployment, and the risk of European unemployment.