Weekly earnings of college and high school graduates were examined and partitioned on the basis of estimated years of work experience. Current Population Surveys (CPS) for each year from 1968 to 1975 were examined. The CPS data are useful to test for the importance of local labor markets because individuals can be assigned to markets by calendar…

A review is presented of Richard Freeman's "The Overeducated American," a book that proposes that the U.S. has entered an era in which the college degree cannot be assumed to be a safe avenue to economic success. Focus here is on five of the book's seven main conclusions. Freeman's evidence documenting the new depression for…

The standard one-period labor supply model that economists have used is in some ways an inadequate tool to evaluate a Family Assistance Plan (FAP). The principal difficulty is that an FAP will have important interperiod or life cycle effects. The pure life cycle model, an extension of the work of Becker and Ghez, is derived here without reference…