Labor market opportunities and education choice of male black and white youths

"Labor market opportunities and education choice of male black and white youths." This paper compares the decision on education attainment by male black and white youths, paying particular attention to labor market opportunities as determinants of their decision. If black youths perceive racial discrimination against them in the labor market, the incentives for them to invest in education are different from those of white youths. We construct race-specific age-earnings profiles and employment probabilities at different levels of education across metropolitan areas, and estimate an education choice model that incorporates these measures of labor market opportunities. Then we simulate the hypothetical situation in which black youths and white youths have access to the same labor market opportunities, to learn how the education gap between the two groups would change if they receive the same treatment in the labor market. We cannot find evidence to support that inferior labor market opportunities contributed to the lower education attainment of black youths.;"How Migration Restrictions Limit Agglomeration and Productivity in China"; and "Are Chinese Cities Too Small?" China strongly restricts rural-urban migration, and within-sector migration of population. These two papers examine the loss in income from insufficient agglomeration of economic activity in the rural and urban sectors due to such restriction. In the urban sector, real income per worker is shown to be an inverted U-shape function of city employment, with the peak point shifting out as industrial composition moves from manufacturing to services, as predicted by economic models of cities. Urban agglomeration benefits are high---real incomes per worker rise sharply with increases in employment from a small size, level out nearer the peak, and then decline very slowly past the peak. The majority of Chinese cities are significantly undersized relative to the employment level leading to peak income. We also estimate rural productivity relationships and find very significant scale effects in labor. There are large potential gains from increased agglomeration in both the rural industrial and urban sectors.