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Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY), this article examines the influence of a region's industrial composition on the educational attainment of children raised by parents who do not have college degrees. The NLSY's geo-coded panel allows for precise measurements of the local industries that shaped the parents' employment opportunities and the labor market that the children directly observed. For cohorts finishing school in the 1990s and early 2000s, concentrations of manufacturing are positively associated with both high school and college attainment. Concentrations of college-degree intensive industries are positively associated with college attainment. I investigate several potential mechanisms that could relate the industrial composition to educational attainment, including returns to education, opportunity costs, parental inputs, community resources, and information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a flexible modeling framework to produce density nowcasts for US inflation at a trading-day frequency. Our framework: (1) combines individual density nowcasts from three classes of parsimonious mixed-frequency models; (2) adopts a novel flexible treatment in the use of the aggregation function; and (3) permits dynamic model averaging via the use of weights that are updated based on learning from past performance. Together these features provide density nowcasts that can accommodate non-Gaussian properties. We document the competitive properties of the nowcasts generated from our framework using high-frequency real-time data over the period 2000-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]