This article examines skill gaps between immigrants and native‐born Americans and generational progress achieved by different immigrant ethnic groups. Evidence of a widening skill gap is not strong. While wage data show a pronounced fall in relative wages of “recent” immigrants, significant independent contributors to that decline are a widening age gap and the increasing price of skill. When attention shifts to legal migrants, the evidence is that legal migrants are, at a minimum, keeping up with native‐born Americans. I find that the concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant ethnic groups is unfounded.

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment, and participation in Canada and the United States using consistent measurement concepts. We show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of those “wanting work”—the unemployed and marginally attached. We also study changes in the fraction of the nonemployed who are unemployed. Using micro data on labor market transition behavior at these margins, we find remarkably consistent results in the two countries, with the marginally attached displaying behavior lying between unemployment and nonattachment. The three nonemployment states are distinct in both countries.

Affirmative action remains controversial. The controversy extends from the original antidiscrimination legislation and its interpretation to estimates of affirmative action's effect on the labor market. This paper provides a progress report on our recent efforts at detecting the effects of affirmative action on minority wages and employment. Although we find a substantial increase in wages for black men and black women over our sample period, the timing of these wage changes is surprising. Most of the wage gains came prior to 1974, before the establishment of an effective monitoring structure for affirmative action. Indeed, when the powers of the EEOC and OFCC are greatest, the wage effects for young blacks are somewhat perverse. Using EEO-1 reports we find a major shift in black employment toward firms most vulnerable to the monitoring and potential sanctions of the affirmative action programs. As with wages, the shift in minority employment came prior to the expansion of the powers and budgets of the EEOC and OFCC. We are surprised by the timing of these changes and are concerned about the quality of the EEO-1 reports.

We document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model with skill- and sector-biased technical change. Finding the model’s parameters through a combination of estimation and calibration, we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1961 and 2009, along with the increase in college attainment and the change in the relative earnings of college graduates. The model predicts that if college costs had ceased to grow after 1961, enrollment in 2010 would have been 3%–6% higher.

Military assignment mechanisms provide a unique opportunity to estimate the impact of high-performing mentors on job advancement of their subordinates. Combining US Army administrative data with officer evaluation reports, we find that high-performing mentors positively affect early junior officer promotion and that early promotion probabilities rise as the duration of the high-quality mentorship increases. These effects are largest for high-ability protégés. Junior officers who were exposed to multiple high-performing mentors did not experience an additional increase in promotion rates.

Our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable-worth wage-adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector. The simulation is based on estimates of within-occupation male/female substitution and across-occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 Census of Population.

The employment to population rate of high school–aged youth has fallen by about 20 percentage points since the late 1980s. One potential explanation is increased competition from substitutable labor, such as immigrants. I demonstrate that the increase in the population of less educated immigrants has had a considerably more negative effect on employment outcomes for native youth than for native adults. At least two factors are at work: there is greater overlap between the jobs that youth and less educated adult immigrants traditionally do, and youth labor supply appears more responsive to immigration-induced wage changes.