I’m pleased to share that my new paper (with Angelica Rivera-Olvera), “Education and Earnings in Arkansas,” has been published in the Journal of Economic Insight.
The paper provides the first recent, comprehensive analysis of the economic returns to education in Arkansas using 2024 Current Population Survey data. We estimate returns using multiple methods—including Mincer earnings functions, full-discounting, Heckman selection correction, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and quantile regression—and find that education continues to be a strong investment. Each additional year of schooling is associated with about a 7.5% increase in earnings, with even higher returns for women. We also document an intriguing post-pandemic decline in Arkansas’s returns to education that contrasts with national trends.
You can read the published version here:
https://journalofeconomicinsight.com/index.php/joei/article/view/1425
An open version is also available on my website:
https://hpatrinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/patrinos_rivera-olvera.pdf
Education, economics and public policy 