Knowledge that Transforms

The H

Society, and the Society of Labor Economists.For more than three decades, Janet has pioneered research on the role of education, family background, social transfer programs, access to health care, and environmental factors in shaping the health and well-being of children and their outcomes as adults.She was a prime mover in making the study of the fetal period and child development an essential concern of labor economics.This pioneering work had a major influence on other fields, including the economics of education, health economics, public economics, and environmental economics.In the early 1990s, Janet started a research agenda on the effectiveness of early childhood

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have mainly focused on the impact of incremental changes to requirements on the recipients. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of partnered welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce causal estimates of the effects on family welfare receipt of introducing such requirements. Using a quasi-experimental design and administrative data, we find large negative effects on welfare receipt for the mature-age partnered women targeted by the reforms and similar effects on welfare receipt of their partners, suggesting that family labor supply decisions were considerably affected.

We identify the labor market returns to university grade point average (GPA) by leveraging a nationwide change in the scaling of grades in Danish universities. Our results show that a reform-induced increase in GPA that is unrelated to ability causes higher earnings immediately after graduation, but the effect fades in subsequent years. The effect at labor market entry is largest for individuals with fewer alternative signals. Although employers initially screen candidates on the basis of skill signals, our findings are consistent with a model in which employers rapidly learn about worker productivity.

Children exposed to pollutants like lead have lower academic achievement and are more likely to engage in risky behavior. However, little is known about whether lead-exposed children affect the long-run outcomes of their peers. We estimate these spillover effects using unique data on preschool blood lead levels (BLLs) matched to education data for all students in North Carolina public schools. We compare siblings whose school-grade cohorts differ in the proportion of children with elevated BLLs, holding constant school and peers’ demographics. Having more lead-exposed peers is associated with lower high school graduation and SAT-taking rates and increased suspensions and absences.

Analyzing data spanning three decades covering the near universe of births, we study county-level differences in Cesarean section (C-section) rates among first-time mothers of singleton births. Our research reveals persistent geographic variation in C-section rates for both low- and high-risk groups. Counties with elevated C-section rates consistently perform more C-sections across mothers at all levels of appropriateness for the procedure. These elevated rates of C-section in high C-section counties are associated with reduced maternal and infant morbidity. We also find that C-section decisions are less responsive to underlying risks for Black mothers relative to white mothers, suggesting potential welfare-reducing disparities.

We study the relationship among occupational employment, occupational wages, and wage inequality. In all occupations, entrants and leavers earn less than stayers, suggesting negative selection effects for growing occupations and positive effects for shrinking ones. We estimate a model of occupational prices and skills that includes specific skill accumulation and endogenous switching. Contrary to uncorrected wages, prices and employment growth are positively related. Forty percent of selection is due to age, as entrants and leavers have had less time to accumulate skills. The remainder is Roy-type selection. Skill prices establish a quantitative connection of occupational changes with surging wage inequality.

Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams’ identity and image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a nonroutine task and identify the importance of these behavioral aspects. In a field experiment (n>1, 700 participants), we vary the salience of team identity, social image concerns, and whether teams face monetary incentives. Increased salience of team identity does not improve performance. Social image motivates the top performers. Additional monetary incentives improve all teams’ outcomes without crowding out teams’ willingness to explore or perform similar tasks again.

Using Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, we study selection bias and the gender wage gap. Employing several methods, we find large declines in the total and unexplained gender gaps in wage offers between 1981 and 2015. Under our preferred selection correction method, the median total and unexplained gaps fell by 0.378 and 0.204 log points, respectively. These are larger declines than if we had not corrected for selection and simply measured convergence in observed wage gaps. However, substantial selectivity-corrected median gender wage gaps remain in 2015: 0.242 log points (total gap) and 0.206 log points (unexplained gap).