Knowledge that Transforms

Previous articleNext article FreeSOLE 2023/28th Annual Meeting Call for PapersPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Society of Labor Economists will hold its 28th Annual Meeting on May 12–13, 2023, at the Sonesta Philadelphia Rittenhouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.More details about the meeting and submission process will be available at https://www.sole-jole.org. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720999 Views: 1090Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeH. Gregg Lewis PrizePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe H. Gregg Lewis Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics during 2020–21 has been awarded to Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen for “The Unintended Consequences of ‘Ban the Box’: Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories are Hidden,” which appeared in the April 2020 issue of the Journal.Individuals with criminal records are severely disadvantaged in the labor market, and black men with such histories are particularly disadvantaged. Various US jurisdictions have adopted ban the box (BTB) policies intended to prevent employers from using criminal histories to screen applicants, in part to reduce racial disparities. However, when employers cannot access such information, they may rely on correlates of criminal history, most notably race and sex, thereby increasing racial and ethnic disparities. The authors use variation in the timing of state and local BTB policies to identify the effect of such policies on the employment of young black and Hispanic men with less than a college degree. In their preferred specification, they find that BTB reduces the employment of young, low-skilled black men by 3.4 percentage points and young, low-skilled Hispanic men by 2.3 percentage points. Strikingly, these effects are smaller when the labor market is tighter and when the respective minority group comprises a larger proportion of the labor force. In addition, the authors find evidence that employment shifts toward groups with a lower proportion of individuals with criminal records: older black men, older Hispanic women, and white men. The authors argue that their results are consistent with employers engaging in statistical discrimination when they cannot obtain information directly on job applications.The committee selected this paper because the empirical work is well executed, the results have clear policy implications, and the article is among the most highly cited of those published in JOLE in the last two years. The authors’ analysis shows the importance of fully considering the implications of social policies on all affected individuals. BTB policies are intended to help the ex-offender population acquire jobs but may instead put a larger minority population at an employment disadvantage by increasing employers’ reliance on statistical discrimination. The paper goes beyond estimating the causal effects of such policies by investigating how they vary regionally and with local labor market conditions. The authors also examine which groups benefit when employers substitute away from younger, low-skilled black and Hispanic males, and they find the evidence consistent with statistical rather than taste-based discrimination. This paper contributes to an important literature showing how policies that suppress information (e.g., criminal records, drug tests, credit histories, health status, educational testing, and employment histories) can have unintended consequences. In recent decades, the quantity of information about individuals that is stored and made publicly available has grown massively. Policies regulating access to and use of these data are likely to be increasingly important. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720635 Views: 1218Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeSherwin Rosen PrizePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDavid Deming is the 2022 recipient of the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to labor economics. Deming is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Deming earned his PhD in public policy from Harvard University in 2010 and served as an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University the following year. He has taught at Harvard University since then. He has served as a coeditor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and the Journal of Human Resources.David is a creative and outstanding scholar who has made first-order contributions to a wide range of labor and applied economics topics. His research illuminates important policy-relevant questions that push the research frontier, including articles on higher education, skill development, economic inequality, technological change, the long-run impacts of early and K–12 schooling, and the connections between education and criminal activity.Deming’s most profound impact may come from his work on the labor market returns to skills. In “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2017), David illustrates how work is placing greater emphasis on “soft skills” like teamwork, social perceptiveness, problem-solving, communication, and adaptability. The labor market increasingly rewards social skills, while the share of less social, purely cognitive-intensive jobs is shrinking. He develops a team production model where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. Those with more social skills are advantaged in trade, which enhances specialization and efficiency. He tests the model’s implications for sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations. He documents the increased wage gain from sorting into social skill–intensive occupations in the 2000s for the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) cohort compared with the 1980s and 1990s for the 1979 cohort.With Ben Weidmann, he followed up this work with experimental evidence (Econometrica, 2021) that gets inside the black box of the social skills/team performance relation and identifies qualities of “team players.” His research characterizing the returns to experience as a race between on-the-job learning and skill obsolescence with Kadeem Noray (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020) similarly brings remarkable data analysis to new theoretical insights. It upends conventional wisdom about the lifetime returns to certain credentials and fields of study. His 2018 Journal of Labor Economics paper with Lisa Kahn presents evidence from a massive database of job postings that cognitive and social skills are complementary.David has made exceptional contributions to the economics of education. His 2009 American Economic Journal: Applied Economics paper uses a within-family siblings design to provide compelling longer-run evidence on the returns to early childhood educational investment. His 2014 American Economic Review paper (with Justine Hastings, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger) documents the long-run implications of school choice and the importance of school quality. Deming has been a leader on policy-related issues in higher education, including the role and regulation of private for-profit postsecondary institutions, the rise of online programs and institutions, the design of student financial aid policies, and public college funding. His 2016 American Economic Review paper (with Noam Yuchtman, Amira Abulafi, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz) presents evidence regarding the value of degrees and certificates from online programs, for-profit colleges, and nonselective public institutions. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721003 Views: 590Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeEdward P. Lazear PrizePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJohn M. Abowd is the recipient of the 2022 Edward P. Lazear Prize for excellence in research, exemplary service to the field, and contributions to civil society. John Abowd is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor Emeritus of Economics, Statistics, and Data Science at Cornell University and associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the US Census Bureau. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST; France), the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA; Germany), and the Institute for Employment Research (IAB; Germany). He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and, of course, the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE). John received an AB in economics from Notre Dame and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. He was on the faculty of the Princeton Department of Economics and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, now the Booth School of Business, before moving to Cornell in 1987.John was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Lazear Prize because of his clear excellence in all three dimensions—research, service to the field, and public service. John has made deep research contributions in several areas. John’s early work included influential papers on unions, such as a study of “queuing” for union jobs (Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1982), with Henry Farber, and a paper on how product market competition affects union wages (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993), with Thomas Lemieux. In joint work with David Card (Econometrica, 1989), John carefully described the structure and statistical properties of wages and hours in the United States. While this and other work would have been sufficient to cement John’s reputation as a leading labor economist, his seminal paper on worker and firm effects on wages (Econometrica, 1999), with Francis Kramarz and David Margolis, revolutionized the use of matched employer-employee data sets. It presaged how these data sets would come to be used in a large fraction of labor economics research ever since.John’s service to the field of labor economics includes consistent contributions to SOLE, where he served as president. John’s efforts at the Census Bureau, starting in 1998, have included leading efforts to create data sets (and access to those data sets), such as the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), that have been key to innumerable research advances in labor economics research. In addition, John has produced a large set of PhD students who are carrying his work forward in labor economics research and public goods provision of useful data.Finally, John’s work at the Census Bureau has also led to important public policy advances. His work on census data sets is valuable across the social sciences. More recently, John and a few other census leaders worked tirelessly to ensure that the 2020 decennial census was a success despite the onset of a pandemic and vigorous attempts to politicize the effort.John’s contributions in all three dimensions of the Lazear Prize criteria have been substantial and will benefit labor economists, as well as broader society, for decades to come. He is an ideal choice for the inaugural Lazear Prize. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721001 Views: 612Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLawrence F. Katz is the 2022 recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Katz graduated from Berkeley in 1981 and earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor and joined the economics faculty of Harvard University after one year, where he is currently the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics. He is a Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) fellow (elected 2005), a past SOLE president (2013–14), a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Katz was chief economist of the US Department of Labor and has served on the advisory boards of several important institutions.Katz’s most influential research studies the evolution of wage inequality in advanced countries. He focuses on the fundamental role of technological change and education. His 1992 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper with Murphy developed the “canonical framework,” a simple model expressing the educational wage premium as reflecting observable shifts in educational supply and a residual technical change term. He found that although increases in the supply of skilled workers reduce inequality, technology often favors more skilled workers, increasing inequality. With Autor and Krueger, he found that increases in observable technology indicators, such as computer usage and R&D, increase skill demand, further bolstering the skill-biased technological change hypothesis. Researchers have adopted these methods to analyze changing inequality in many countries.His authoritative book with Claudia Goldin, The Race between Education and Technology (2008), examines how the growth of educational institutions contained inequality for most of the twentieth century. The slowdown in educational attainment for cohorts entering the labor market after roughly 1980 increased the return to schooling in the last quarter of the century.With Autor and Kearney (American Economic Review, 2006; Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008), Katz argues for a more nuanced role of technology. Digital technologies tend to replace routine tasks performed by occupations in the middle of the wage distribution, where wages and employment fell noticeably from the 1990s, compared with both the top and the bottom of the earnings distribution. European studies replicate this “hollowing out” of “middle jobs.” His recent work shows that the growth of large “superstar firms” with low labor shares and high profit margins explains the decline in labor’s share of gross domestic product (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020). Again, he links this to changes in the fundamental nature of technologies.Other work demonstrates the importance of place. With Kling and Liebman (Econometrica, 2007; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001), he demonstrated that although changing neighborhoods did not raise adults’ earnings, it substantially improved their mental health. With Chetty and Hendren (American Economic Review, 2016), he found that better neighborhoods helped the future labor market outcomes of younger children.In sum, Lawrence Katz is an extraordinarily productive scholar who has changed the face of social science. His work is marked by an intense empirical seriousness and a strong focus on policy. His research seeks to change the world, not just to interpret it.Beyond his research contributions, Katz has provided distinguished service to the profession as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for the past 30 years. Under his leadership, it has become the most widely cited economics journal. His success in reducing review times at that publication has set the standard for other top journals in economics. He is renowned for his generous mentorship of junior scholars and his decency and respect in dealing with other economists. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721002 Views: 571Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Alan Krueger was one of the most prolific and influential economists of his generation. While his research extended into many different areas, including environmental economics,macroeconomics, and behavioral economics, he identifiedfirst and foremost as a “labor economist.”Hewas a labor economist par excellence, always pushing the field in a new (or long overlooked) direction while maintaining the highest standards for the quality and credibility of his empirical findings. The papers in this issue, written by his students and colleagues in labor economics, pay tribute to some of his major contributions to our field. Virtually every paper builds on one or more of Alan’s ideas. Alan earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell in 1983. His early education included classes in labor economics and statistics that informed his work throughout his career, including a deep appreciation of the value of original data. Thiswas reflected in the surveys at the heart of many of his best-known papers—including his studies of minimum wages (Katz and Krueger 1992; Card and Krueger 1994), twins (Ashenfelter and Krueger 1994), well-being (Kahneman et al. 2004), and wage posting (Hall and Krueger 2012)—and by his founding of the Survey Research Center at Princeton in 1993. Alan’s 1987 dissertation at Harvard focused on wage determination—a topic he returned to often. The first chapter, which was his job market paper and was later published in theQuarterly Journal of Economics (Krueger 1991), is remarkable for the bold simplicity of its design. Alan proposed to

We use public documents from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University lawsuit to examine admissions preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). More than 43% of white admits are ALDC; the share for African American, Asian American, and Hispanics is less than 16%. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.

How widespread are social network effects? To answer this, I introduce a page-based approach for identifying individuals living in close proximity and compare how the propensity to work in the same industry varies among worker pairs residing in the same versus different areas. Across the 70 largest cities in the early twentieth-century United States, those from the same area are more likely to work in the same industry. On average, the increase in propensity is around 14%–20% of the baseline mean. These effects also tend to be stronger among single women and migrants from the same country of origin.

We study the effects of peer gender composition in STEM doctoral programs on persistence and degree completion. Leveraging unique new data and quasi-random variation in gender composition across cohorts within programs, we show that women entering cohorts with no female peers are 11.7pp less likely to graduate within 6 years than their male counterparts. A 1 sd increase in the percentage of female students differentially increases women's probability of on-time graduation by 4.4pp. These gender peer effects function primarily through changes in the probability of dropping out in the first year of a Ph.D. program.

We analyze the impact of Ford Motor Company’s compensation practices on the Detroit-area labor market from 1918 to 1947. Previous studies imply that Ford paid race-independent wages, but its Black workers were sorted into undesirable departments. We extend these results using propensity score reweighting of census data and Ford’s records and confirm that Ford paid equal wages. We then develop a search model with discriminatory and equal wage firms to assess the impact of Ford’s policy on the larger labor market. Calibrated simulations suggest that Ford may have reduced the wage gap in southeastern Michigan by as much as 50%.