Knowledge that Transforms

We employ German social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts, starting with the birth year 1935. Our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings: West German men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85% more lifetime inequality than their fathers. In contrast, both short-term and long-term intragenerational mobility are stable. Longer unemployment spells of workers at the bottom of the distribution of younger cohorts contribute to explaining 20%–40% of the overall increase in lifetime earnings inequality.

Despite their documented importance in the labor market, little is known about how workers use social networks to find jobs and their resulting effect on earnings. I use geographically detailed US employer-employee data to infer the role of social networks in connecting workers to jobs in high-paying firms. To identify social interactions in job search, I exploit variation in social network quality within small neighborhoods. Workers are more likely to change jobs, and more likely to move to a higher-paying firm, when their neighbors are employed in high-paying firms. Furthermore, local referral networks help match high-ability workers to high-paying firms.

A public college randomly assigns applicants into a group that can enroll immediately and a group that can do so only after 1 year. One and a half years after the first group enrolled, individuals in that group were 19 percentage points more likely to be enrolled than those who had to wait. I present a model of educational decision making that predicts a substantial effect of deferral on attainment only when opportunity costs (wages) can vary across time within individuals. I estimate the model to project the long-term effect of deferred admission on attainment for different groups of applicants.