Knowledge that Transforms

We consider the link between parents’ influence over the preferences of children, parental investments in children’s human capital, and children’s support of elderly parents. It may pay for parents to spend resources to “manipulate” children’s preferences in order to induce them to support their parents in old age. Since parents invest more in children when they expect greater support, manipulation of child preferences may end up helping children and parents. A new result, which we call the “Rotten Parent Theorem,” demonstrates that if children are altruistic, then even selfish parents will make the optimal investment in their children’s human capital.

We treat rising inequality as an equilibrium outcome in which human capital investment fails to keep pace with rising demand for skills. Investment affects skill supply and prices on three margins: the type of human capital in which to invest, how much to acquire, and the intensity of use. The latter two represent the intensive margins of human capital acquisition and utilization. These choices are substitutes for the creation of new skilled workers, yet they are complementary with each other, magnifying inequality. When skill-biased technical change drives economic growth, greater inequality reduces growth.

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) awards rise during recessions. If marginal applicants are able to work but unable to find jobs, countercyclical Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefit extensions may reduce SSDI uptake. Exploiting UI extensions in the Great Recession as a source of variation, we find no indication that expiration of UI benefits causes SSDI applications and can rule out effects of meaningful magnitude. A supplementary analysis finds little overlap between the two programs' recipient populations: only 28% of SSDI awardees had any labor force attachment in the prior calendar year, and of those, only 4% received UI.

This paper estimates the impact of college teaching on students’ academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of compulsory courses. We find that teacher effects on students' academic and labor market outcomes are only mildly positively correlated and that the professors who are best at improving the academic achievement of their students are not always also the ones who boost their earnings the most. For the least able students, the correlation between the academic and labor market effectiveness of teachers turns out to be negative.

The cost of divorce influences the bargaining position of spouses and thus their behavior within the marriage. This study takes advantage of a major and unexpected reduction in divorce costs in Spain to estimate the causal effects on domestic violence. Results suggest a 30% decline in spousal conflict as a consequence of the reform. Spousal violence is found to have decreased among couples who remained married after the modification in the law, which suggests an important role for changes in bargaining within the marriage when divorce becomes a more credible (cheaper) option.

We examine the impact of restructuring active labor market programs for unemployed immigrants in Finland. Exploiting a discontinuity in the phase-in rules of the reform, we find that it increased compliers’ cumulative earnings by 47% over a 10-year follow-up period. We attribute these improvements to a more efficient use of existing resources. The reform did not affect total days in training, but it did modify the content toward training specifically designed for immigrants.

Economic theory predicts that agents work harder if they believe in the mission of the organization. We conduct a real-effort experiment with workers whose mission preferences are known, randomly assigning them to organizations with clear missions to create both matches and mismatches. Our estimates suggest that matching is a strong motivator, especially compared to mismatches. Further, we find that performance pay increases effort, though mostly among mismatched workers who substitute pay for matching. Our results suggest the importance of defining a clear mission to an organization and highlight the significance of sorting, screening, and compensation policies.

We provide a direct empirical test of Montgomery’s 1991 notion that firms hire workers through social ties of productive employees as these workers know others with high unobserved productivity. We focus on coworker networks and show that firms recruit workers with better military draft test scores but shorter schooling when hiring previous colleagues of current employees, suggesting that firms use these networks to attract workers with better qualities in hard-to-observe dimensions. Incumbent workers’ abilities predict the incidence, abilities, and wages of linked entrants. These results suggest that firms rely on the ability density of the studied networks when setting entry wages.

Among typical entrepreneurs, is serial entrepreneurship common? Is the serial entrepreneur more likely to succeed? If so, why? These questions are addressed using data on all establishments started between 1990 and 2011 to sell retail goods and services in Texas. An entrepreneur is the owner of a new business. A serial entrepreneur is one who opens repeat businesses. We find that 25.6% of businesses are operated by serial entrepreneurs. These are the more successful businesses: prior business experience increases the longevity of the next business opened. Results with owner fixed effects suggest that past experience imparts valuable business skills.

Using a new firm-level data set that includes explicit information on referrals by current employees, we investigate the hiring process and the relationships among referrals, match quality, wage trajectories, and turnover for a single US corporation and test various predictions of theoretical models of labor market referrals. We find that referred candidates are more likely to be hired; experience an initial wage advantage, which dissipates over time; and have longer tenure in the firm. Further, the variances of the referred and nonreferred wage distributions converge over time. The observed referral effects appear to be stronger at lower skill levels. The data also permit analysis of the role of referrer-referee pair characteristics.