Educational Attainment and the Changing US Wage Structure: Dynamic Implications on Young Individuals' Choices

We present a dynamic model of individuals' educational investments that allows us to explore alternative modeling strategies for forecasting future wage distributions. The key innovation we propose is an approach to forecasting that relies only on the information that would be available at the actual time decisions are made and which incorporates the role of parameter uncertainty into the decision-making process. We compare the performance of our method with alternative models of forecasting behavior, based on CPS data over the period 1964-2004.