High Rates of Return on College Education Comes with High...

Attending college has been considered one of the most protable investments, annualized returns ranging from 8% to 13% (Card 1999). I utilize a simple approach, as in Mehra and Prescott (1985), to quantify how much of the excess return to college is explained by its risk. I also explore the role played by heterogeneous ability by developing a life-cycle model with endogenous enrollment and analyzing the dropout risk effect on college returns. Under the risk premium approach, the permanent inc...

 eBook Purchasers are Second-Class

We have come to accept as inevitable a duo of coexisting lousy extremes. Sometimes information is supposedly free but people are subject to weird surveillance and influence, with insufficient commensurate rights. This is the familiar world of Google, Facebook, et al. It will not be a sustainable path as technology advances. On the flip side, customers can be locked into one-sided contracts in order to have access to what they want online. This is the world of proprietary tree-shaped stores f...