An increasing refugee population has led to scrutiny of the effects of refugees in the United States. One way to assess effects is through studying economic and fiscal impacts. We used an input--output framework and refugee employment and wage data to estimate the short-term economic and fiscal impacts, both indirect and induced effects, of…

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 67% of Americans support raising the federal minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, with 41% strongly supporting the increase. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour has been the battle cry for many members of Congress, while others have opposed or expressed concern regarding, such…

The abrupt closing of college campuses this spring due to the spread of COVID-19 upended the lives of students and their families and disrupted the higher education sector. The impact of these closures and the questions of whether and how to reopen campuses this fall have been widely discussed. Less attention has been paid to the potential…

Whether improved local economic conditions lead to better student outcomes is theoretically ambiguous and will depend on how schools use additional revenues and how students and teachers respond to rising private sector wages. The Texas boom in shale oil and gas drilling, with its large and localized effects on wages and the tax base, provides a…

The most significant investment California made in the 1960s was the creation of, arguably, the best public higher education system in the world. The 1965 Master Plan for Higher Education created a three-tiered system of higher education that provided a place in college for any Californian seeking the opportunity. From research universities to…

In this report, we present the results of a thought experiment in which we estimated the potential costs and benefits to society of achieving equality in educational attainment and related workforce outcomes by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. We conducted this thought experiment to clarify the role that education can play in reducing…

Many Americans would agree that all people should have equal educational opportunity and equal pay for equal work. And yet, inequality in postsecondary education access, college completion, and post-college outcomes such as wages stubbornly persists, along with the impression that achieving equal outcomes would be too expensive and would take too…

Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and "intraoccupational" processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we…

The pace of income growth since the 1970s has been slower for Pennsylvanians than in the 30 years following 1945. In addition to being slower, income growth since the 1970s has also been lopsided, with a small fraction of the highest-income households capturing most income growth in Pennsylvania. This report examines the extent to which these…

We use a new, matched worker-firm dataset for the United Kingdom to estimate the income loss resulting from firm closure and mass layoffs. We track workers for up to nine years after the displacement event, and the availability of predisplacement characteristics allows us to implement difference-in-differences estimators using propensity score…

This article documents a model for forecasting earnings of the nontraditional student based on macrolevel changes in educational attainment within the workforce using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. It also presents a theoretical case that illustrates the value of improving one's educational attainment level in order to sustain an annualized…

On the basis of official statistics, poverty has halved in Ghana over the period from 1991 to 2005. Our objective in this paper is to assess how far this fall was linked to the creation of better paying jobs and the increase in education. We find that earnings rose rapidly in the period from 1998 to 2005, by 64% for men and by 55% for women. While…

General acceptance of the strong relationships between education, income, and public economic strength is at the core of all of college attainment goals at the national and state levels. The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) have collaborated to develop online tools…

How pronounced is income inequality around the world--and how can education help reduce it? This paper reports the following: (1) Across OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, the average income of the richest 10% of the population was about nine times that of the poorest 10% before the onset of the global economic…

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. With a duration of eighteen months, this recession was almost double the length of the average post-World War II economic downturn. Although the worst recession since the Great Depression is now technically over, this analysis…