Knowledge that Transforms

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.

Despite the importance of expectations in models of decision behavior under uncertainty, few empirical economists have made use of subjective expectations data in estimating such models. Assuming that expectations about future behavior accurately portray optimal future behavior conditional on current information, it is shown that such data can provide similar information about the decision process as can data on current or retrospective behavior. The value of self-reported choice expectations is illustrated by using information on respondents’ expected future occupation in the estimation of a structural dynamic model of teacher career decisions under uncertainty.

Using large American and British survey data, this paper provides structural estimates of the production functions for birth weight and fetal growth. In addition to maternal smoking, we estimate the impact of when a mother stops work, which has not been considered in the literature. Mothers’ work interruptions of up to 3 months before birth have a positive effect on birth outcomes, especially among British children. Parental behavior appears to respond to child idiosyncratic endowments in a way that suggests that parents have inequity aversion concerns. Evidence in favor of inequity aversion emerges also from the analysis of breast-feeding decisions.

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. The current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites, and women have gained relative to men. However, the skill distribution has widened overall. Shifts in parental education generate many of the observed changes. We also provide speculative estimates suggesting that if recent trends in technology and the supply of human capital continue, wage inequality will increase substantially by 2025.

An extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability. We extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal-labor-market history of a medium-sized firm in the financial services industry. Our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor’s and master’s degree holders, while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and PhDs is mixed.

This article proposes a new approach to modeling heterogeneous human capital using task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The key feature of the model is that it departs from the Roy model, which treats occupations as distinct categories and conceives of occupations as bundles of tasks. The advantages of this approach are that it can accommodate many occupations without computational burden and provide a clear interpretation as to how and why skills are differently rewarded across occupations. The model is structurally estimated by the Kalman filter using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.

Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less over their careers, hold more junior positions, and exit the occupation at a faster rate. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze mobility and compensation. We find, controlling for executive rank and background, that women earn higher compensation than men, experience more income uncertainty, and are promoted more quickly. Among survivors, being female increases the chance of becoming chief executive officer. The unconditional gender pay gap and job-rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives exiting the occupation at higher rates than men.

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers’ ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on within-pupil regressions exploiting variation in achievements across three compulsory subjects tested at age 14 and age 11. Using this novel strategy, we find significant and sizable negative effects arising from bad peers at the bottom of the ability distribution but little evidence that average peer quality and good peers matter. However, these results are heterogeneous, with girls benefiting from academically bright peers and boys not.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were given the opportunity to migrate to Germany. Within 15 years, 2.8 million individuals had done so. Upon arrival, these immigrants were exogenously allocated to different regions to ensure an even distribution across the country. Their inflow can therefore be seen as a quasi-experiment of immigration. I analyze the effect of these inflows on skill-specific employment rates and wages. The results indicate a displacement effect of 3.1 unemployed workers for every 10 immigrants that find a job, but no effect on relative wages.

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