Students often accumulate substantial work experience before leaving school. Because conventional earnings functions do not control for in‐school work experience, their estimates of the return to schooling include the benefit of work experience gained along the way. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I estimate wage models with and without controls for in‐school work experience. The estimated schooling coefficients are 25%–44% higher (depending on how I control for ability bias) when in‐school work experience is omitted than when it is included. These findings indicate that conventional models significantly overstate the wage effects of “school only.”

We investigate an unexplored avenue through which unemployment insurance increases unemployment. As unemployment insurance benefits rise, workers lose incentive to “preempt” impending layoffs by changing jobs. We formalize this prediction in a job search model and investigate it empirically by estimating a proportional hazard model with data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, using state‐ and year‐specific algorithms to compute each worker’s expected unemployment insurance benefits. Our estimates reveal that an exogenous increase in benefits deters job quits by a small but statistically significant amount.

The authors estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career. This array fully characterizes past employment experience, regardless of how sporadic it has been. Their model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form. The authors find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject their model. Furthermore, they find that 12 percent of the male-female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.

Using National Longitudinal Survey data, the authors estimate proportional hazard models in order to learn whether it is more difficult for employers to identify female nonquitters than male nonquitters. They find that women may be a higher risk than men in the overall sample because they are more likely to be "movers" for unobserved reasons. When the authors focus on a relatively recent birth cohort, however, they find that it is no longer difficult to identify female nonquitters. Unobserved heterogeneity becomes an insignificant factor among women and virtually all determinants of turnover are observable at the time of hire. Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.

Tenure responses in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Longitudinal Surveys are often inconsistent with calendar time. These inconsistencies pose special problems in the PSID because job changes cannot be identified directly, so researchers must infer them from error-ridden tenure data. We use alternative rules for partitioning PSID data into jobs and then estimate several wage and mobility models to assess the sensitivity of parameter estimates to the partitioning method. We also assess the importance of replacing "raw" tenure data with imputed measures that are internally consistent.

In light of recent, state-level actions banning racial preference in college admissions decisions, we investigate how whites and minorities differ in their college-going behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate a sequential model of college attendance and graduation decisions that allows correlations among the errors. Our estimates reveal that minorities are more likely than observationally equivalent whites to attend colleges of all quality levels. Being a minority has a positive effect on graduation probabilities, but, overall, minorities are less likely than their white counterparts to complete college because they possess fewer favorable unobserved factors.

This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to distinguish empirically between mover—stayer, “search good,” and “experience good” models of job mobility. We estimate wage models in which the pattern of overall job mobility affects both the level and tenure slope of the log-wage path. After controlling for the correlation between mobility patterns and time-constant person- and job-specific unobservables, we find that workers who undergo persistent mobility have lower log-wage paths than less mobile workers. This finding is consistent with models in which job mobility is driven by time-varying unobservables, such as “experience good” models, where changes in perceived match quality cause turnover.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a significant number of [U.S.] women work continuously during their early careers which women are likely to do so and how these women compare to men in terms of their interfirm mobility and earnings. The data are from the young men and young women cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLS)....Continuous employment is by no means the norm among young women but it appears to be a growing trend....In comparing starting wages of men and women we find that the wage gap is less pronounced among continuously employed workers than among the full sample in almost every race-cohort-schooling group and the gap is narrowing far more rapidly among the continuously employed. (EXCERPT)

Economists have invested a great deal of effort in trying to understand the motivation for family transfers, yet recent empirical work testing the seemingly appealing models of altruism and exchange has led to decidedly mixed results. A major stumbling block has been the lack of adequate data. We take a fresh look at the issue using responses to an innovative survey question that directly asks mother about the planned division of their estates. We find that both altruism and exchange are frequently offered as explanations of behavior and are of nearly equal importance. Furthermore, the explanations are consistent with observable characteristics of the mother, lending support to the validity of the question. We also find that among step or adopted families, genetic ties play an important role. Because motivating factors appear to differ across families the lack of a consensus among previous researchers about motives ought not to be surprising.