Knowledge that Transforms

This paper assesses the importance of school and neighborhood peers in shaping educational achievement, adolescent misbehavior, and adult crime. Using cohort variation within Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, we focus on the impact of peers whose parents have been arrested, which is strongly and independently predictive of worse outcomes. Results indicate that a 5 percentage point increase in school peers linked to parental arrest reduces educational achievement by 0.016 standard deviations and increases adult arrest rates by 5%. Additional evidence indicates that peer effects are primarily driven by interactions in schools rather than in neighborhoods.

I study the consequences of letter grades serving as coarse measures of academic achievement using university administrative data that record both the letter grade and the precise mark (0–100) received for each course that a given student takes. I exploit a regression discontinuity design with marks as the running variable. I find that receiving a better grade in a single class results in USD 32 greater monthly earnings after graduation, a 1.4% increase. I also find that marginal students who receive a worse grade take significantly easier courses and earn lower grades in future semesters.

This paper estimates the effect of minimum wage increases on work that is not covered by minimum wage laws. I find that minimum wage increases in the early 2000s resulted in small reductions in engagement in traditional self-employment. Following the development of the online gig economy in the 2010s, a 10% increase in the minimum wage increased the number of nonemployer establishments classified as transportation and warehousing services by approximately 2.7%. The counties most likely to exhibit a positive relationship between the minimum wage and participation in uncovered work are those with low labor market concentration and active Uber marketplaces.

From 2002 to 2018, the fraction of minority-segregated public schools in the United States roughly doubled, but the fraction of White-segregated schools decreased at an even faster rate. Endogenous segregation fueled by parents choosing schools on the basis of their racial compositions can in principle dwarf all other determinants of segregation over time because of social multiplier effects. However, we find that demographic change from Hispanic immigration has been the biggest driver of these trends. These findings are particularly pronounced in urban areas, which experienced the largest changes in segregation and are where policy makers are most concerned about the pernicious effects of segregation.

Worker mobility and wages have declined in the United States amid rising employer market power. I propose a theory of the labor market in which a decrease in employer competition, characterized by fewer firms per worker, drives the decline in worker mobility and wages. A finite and decreasing number of employers exert market power by excluding their offers from the outside options of their employees. This reduces the value of workers’ outside options and, consequently, their wages and transitions across employers. I quantify the model to explain the long-run decline in worker mobility and wages and examine its cross-sectional implications.

Using a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we test how the sudden absence of fans at football games impacts player performance in Italy. We find that African players, who are most commonly targeted by racial harassment, play better when fans are no longer at the stadium. A similar, albeit weaker, effect is detected among black players. Using official records of racist behavior by fans, we show that performance improves the most on teams that were subject to abuse before the lockdown. Our evidence suggests that racist pressure can harm discriminated groups and lower the overall quality of the game.

We investigate how reforms of Canada’s child allowances affected household poverty and maternal employment—the 2015 increase and expansion of the Universal Child Care Benefit and the 2016 introduction of a new Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We document that both reforms reduced child poverty, although the CCB had greater effect. By 2018, we estimate that the CCB reduced poverty by 11% in families headed by a single mother and by nearly 17% in two-parent families. We find no evidence, on either the extensive or the intensive margin, of a negative labor supply response to either of the program reforms.

Workers struggle to understand prospective employers. Through experienced workers’ volunteered reviews, Glassdoor is a platform seeking to provide information about prospective employers to job seekers. We find that the content most valuable to job seekers (negative information) is the kind most risky to supply, pointing to a catch-22. Higher ratings increase job applications to smaller firms only, creating an incentive for them to discourage negative reviews. Concerns about employer retaliation discourage negative reviews and motivate employees who do disclose to conceal aspects of their identity, degrading the information’s value. Reputation institutions provide valuable but partial solutions to workers’ information problems.

We provide evidence that short-term shocks to student cognitive performance have long-lasting consequences for human capital development. We use administrative data from Mexico City to show that students’ exposure to violent crime in the week immediately prior to a high-stakes exam lowers females’ test scores by 11% of a standard deviation. As a result, 19% of female students exposed to violent crime are subsequently assigned to less preferred, lower-quality high schools. We find no such effect for males and show that crime-induced concentration problems are an underlying mechanism behind the detrimental effects on females’ test scores.

Has the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States changed over time? Constructing a large historical linked sample, I show that upward mobility in the early twentieth century was greater for those who grew up in the coastal and industrial regions, in contrast to more recent times, where mobility is higher among persons who were raised in the middle of the country. The historical patterns are not driven by imperfections in record linkage or measurement error in economic status.