Knowledge that Transforms

We use a résumé audit study to investigate the role of employment and unemployment histories in callbacks to job applications. We find that applicants with 52 weeks of unemployment have a lower callback rate than those with shorter spells. There is no relationship, however, between spell length and callback among applicants with spells of 24 weeks or less. We also find that both younger and older applicants have a lower callback probability than prime-aged applicants. Finally, we find that applicants who are employed at the time of application have a lower callback rate than do unemployed applicants.

Intergenerational income mobility is lower in the United States than in Canada but varies significantly within each country. Our subnational analysis finds that the national border only partially distinguishes the approximately 1,000 regions we analyze within these countries. The Canada-US border divides central and eastern Canada from the US Great Lakes and northeastern regions. Simultaneously, some Canadian regions have more in common with the low-mobility southern parts of the United States than with the rest of Canada; that these areas represent a much larger fraction of the US population also explains why mobility is lower in the United States.

Intergenerational income transmission varies across commuting zones (CZs). I investigate whether children’s educational outcomes help to explain this variation. Differences among CZs in the relationship between parental income and children’s human capital explain only one-ninth of the variation in income transmission. A similar share is explained by differences in the return to human capital. One-third reflects earnings differences not mediated by human capital, and 40% reflects differences in marriage patterns. Intergenerational mobility appears to reflect job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets more than it does the education system.

We present results of a randomized trial testing alternative approaches of mapping student achievement into rewards for teachers. Teachers in 216 schools in western China were assigned to performance pay schemes where teacher performance was assessed by one of three different methods. We find that teachers offered “pay-for-percentile” incentives outperform teachers offered simpler schemes based on class-average achievement or average gains over a school year. Moreover, pay-for-percentile incentives produced broad-based gains across students within classes. That teachers respond to relatively intricate features of incentive schemes highlights the importance of paying close attention to performance pay design.

Despite great focus on and public investment in STEM education, little causal evidence connects quantitative coursework to students’ economic outcomes. I show that state changes in minimum high school math requirements substantially increase black students’ completed math coursework and their later earnings. The marginal student’s return to an additional math course is 10%, roughly half the return to a year of high school, and is partly explained by a shift toward more cognitively skilled occupations. White students’ coursework and earnings are unaffected. Rigorous standards for quantitative coursework can close meaningful portions of racial gaps in economic outcomes.

This paper compares the performance of teachers hired on the basis of a standardized exam to those hired at the union’s discretion in Mexico. My results show that the discretionary hires perform considerably worse than the rule-based hires (as measured by value added to student achievement). The evidence presented here shows the impact of personnel selection mechanisms on the quality of public service delivery.

Mortality is a crucial indicator of well-being, and recent mortality trends have been a subject of public debate in many Western countries. This paper compares mortality inequality in Canada and the United States over the period 1990/91 through 2010/11. In Canada, mortality inequality remained constant among the youngest but increased for men over 24 and women over 14. In contrast, in the United States, mortality inequality fell for children and youth and either modestly increased or held steady at older ages. By 2010/11, the initially higher US rates of infant and child mortality had almost converged to their Canadian counterparts.

We exploit cross-cohort variation in the prevalence of teacher strikes within and across provinces in Argentina to examine how teacher strikes affect student long-run outcomes. Being exposed to the average incidence of strikes during primary school reduces labor earnings of males and females by 3.2% and 1.9%, respectively. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this amounts to an aggregate annual earnings loss of $2.34 billion. We also find an increase in unemployment and a decline in the skill levels of the occupations into which students sort. These effects are driven, at least in part, by a reduction in educational attainment.

We provide evidence that constraints that prevent highly skilled women from working long hours hinder gender pay equality. We show that relaxing one such constraint by increasing the supply of substitutes for household production—proxied by intercity variation in predicted low-skilled immigration—increases the relative earnings of women in occupations that disproportionately reward overwork. Low-skilled immigration inflows induce young women to enter occupations with higher returns to overwork and shift women toward higher quantiles of the male wage distribution. The share of women in the top decile remains unaffected, suggesting that other barriers prevent women from reaching the very top.

This paper studies the differential persistent effects of initial economic conditions for labor market entrants in the United States from 1976 to 2015 by education, gender, and race using labor force survey data. We find persistent earnings and wage reductions, especially for less advantaged entrants, that increases in government support only partly offset. We confirm that the results are unaffected by selective migration and labor market entry by also using a double-weighted average unemployment rate at labor market entry for each birth cohort and state-of-birth cell based on average state migration rates and average cohort education rates from census data.