Knowledge that Transforms

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRichard Blundell is the 2020 recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Blundell is the David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at University College London and the director of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, the Econometric Society, and the British Academy; an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. Richard has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Prize in Labor Economics, the Nemmers Prize in Economics, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 1995 Richard received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award for the best young economist in Europe from the European Economic Association, and in 2014 he received a knighthood for his services to economics and social sciences. Richard has served as coeditor of the Journal of Econometrics and Econometrica and as president of the European Economics Association, the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Royal Economic Society.Richard was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, England, and took his undergraduate degree in economics and statistics at the University of Bristol. After completing his MS at the London School of Economics, Richard joined the faculty at the University of Manchester, where he remained for 10 years. In 1984 he was appointed to the David Ricardo Chair at University College London, where he has subsequently taught and mentored many generations of graduate students and junior faculty. From 1986 to 2016 he was also research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.From his earliest published papers Richard’s work has been focused on using economic theory and econometric methods to model and understand individual choices and to help inform policy making on issues such as taxation, pensions, training programs, and innovation policy. His work has provided an integrated treatment of consumption and employment decisions to estimate labor supply elasticities, to analyze the effects of tax reforms, and to help explain the divergence between income and consumption inequality. Richard has also made many fundamental contributions to econometric methodology, including the development of new methods to address endogeneity in censored and limited dependent variable settings and for estimating dynamic panel data models.In a series of innovative papers spanning more than 40 years, Richard has investigated the joint behavior of consumption and labor supply and has emphasized to the profession the insights that can be gained only by examining the two together. His papers on the retirement savings puzzle with James Banks and Sarah Tanner, on consumption inequality and partial insurance with Luigi Pistaferri and Ian Preston, and on collective labor supply with Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Thierry Magnac, and Costas Meghis all build on this important theme.Throughout his career Richard has also focused on the important role that careful economic modeling, combined with cutting-edge econometric methods, can play in the analysis of labor market policies such as training and welfare-to-work programs. His papers on the Working Family Tax Credit program and the New Deal training program for youths are exemplars of this approach.In light of Richard’s long series of important contributions to the theory and practice of applied economics, his generous support and mentoring of young economists, and his key roles in the profession and on numerous government advisory boards and commissions, he is an outstanding and truly worthy recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award.2020 Nominating Committee:Katherine Abraham (ex officio)David Card (chair)Daron AcemogluHilary HoynesJennifer HuntAlexandre MasBarbara Petrongolo Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 38, Number 3July 2020 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709476 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeSOLE 2021/26th Annual Meetings Call for PapersPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Society of Labor Economists will hold the 26th Annual Meetings on May 14–15, 2021, at the Sonesta Philadelphia, 1800 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103.Complete papers should be submitted for both full and poster sessions. Only one submission per person is permitted. Keep checking the website at https://sole-jole.org for a link to the submission portal.The deadline for submission is October 31, 2020.Robert Moffitt, PresidentKevin Lang, President-ElectThomas Lemiux, Vice President Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 38, Number 3July 2020 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709392 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeH. Gregg Lewis PrizePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe H. Gregg Lewis Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics during 2018–19 has been awarded to Ankita Patnaik for “Reserving Time for Daddy: The Consequences of Fathers’ Quotas,” which appeared in the October 2019 issue of the Journal.The Prize Committee consisted of Marianne Page (chair), William Kerr, and Petra Todd. The relationships between the division of household labor, formal childcare, and the gender gap in wages have long been of interest to labor economists. Patnaik’s study focuses on the potentially important role of fathers’ involvement in early childcare and the ways in which well-designed family leave policies might influence these relationships. Previous studies have shown that a disproportionate amount of housework is done by women and that this contributes to the gender pay gap. As a result, men’s involvement at home has received increasing public attention, and some countries have enacted family leave policies that incentivize father’s participation in parental leave. Little is known, however, about what types of incentives will be most successful in getting parents to share leave more equally or what the long-run impacts of successful short-term policies might be.Patnaik leverages a natural experiment generated by the 2006 introduction of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan to provide the first causal analysis of the shorter- and longer-term consequences of a policy aimed at promoting paternity leave. This policy established a nontransferable right to 5 weeks of leave for fathers at the time of their child’s birth. Using both regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs that exploit the fact that other provinces did not make similar changes in their family leave policies, Patnaik finds that the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan was very effective. Fathers’ leave claims increased by 53 percentage points, and fathers’ leave duration increased by 3 weeks.The committee was impressed with the author’s thorough analysis of a novel policy event, the employment of multiple methodological approaches, and her detailed exploration of mechanisms. What excited us most, however, was her follow-up analysis with time diary data, which shows that the policy-induced increase in fathers’ leave taking had a persistent impact several years after the birth, shifting households more toward a dual-caregiver, dual-earner model. This is an important finding because it suggests that small changes in initial parenting experiences can have long-lasting effects on parents’ behavior and that there may not need to be a trade-off between gender equality in the labor market and parental investments in children. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 38, Number 3July 2020 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709396 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeSherwin Rosen AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 2020, the Society of Labor Economists awards the Sherwin Rosen Prize to Magne Mogstad for outstanding contributions in the field of labor economics.Magne Mogstad is the Gary S. Becker Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and has taught there since 2014. He previously was an assistant professor at University College London from 2011 to 2013 and a research economist at Statistics Norway from 2005 to 2011. Mogstad earned his PhD in economics from the University of Oslo in 2008. Among his many commendations, he has won the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Young Labor Economist Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Fridjof Nansens Award for Young Norwegian Researchers, and the Sandmo Prize. Mogstad has been a coeditor of the Journal of Political Economy since 2017 and served as a coeditor of the Journal of Public Economics from 2015 to 2018.Mogstad is a creative, prolific, and insightful scholar who has made deep and influential contributions to labor economics. His research has generated important advances in core issues related to economic inequality and intergenerational mobility, human capital investments, the economics of the family, public economics and social policy, and empirical methodology. He is an innovative leader in harnessing the power of large and rich administrative data sets combined with more credible identification strategies to generate new, compelling, and policy-relevant insights into important social problems. He also has pushed out the frontiers of econometrics in directions of tremendous value for applied microeconomic research. Mogstad’s extraordinarily wide-ranging contributions have greatly enhanced our understanding of topics such as the importance of peer effects and family interactions in decisions to participate in social programs; the impact of technological change (broadband internet) on the labor market and some illicit activities (sex crimes); the estimation of labor market returns to years of schooling, vocational education, and field of study in college; the impacts of public subsidies for child care on parents and children; the impacts and operation of disability programs; the estimation of firm effects on wages and the implications for the importance of compensating wage differentials and rent sharing in wage inequality; the potential rehabilitative effects of incarceration; the impacts of assortative mating on inequality; and the nonexperimental estimation of treatment effects as well as the strengths and limitations of instrumental variable estimates.Illustrative examples of Mogstad’s exemplary empirical contributions are his projects providing new insights and more compelling causal estimates of peer and family effects on social program participation and on the insurance value of disability insurance (DI). His analysis of intergenerational effects on DI participation (with Gordon Dahl and Adreas Kostøl, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014) exploits the random assignment of judges to DI applicants who appeal after being initially denied benefits in Norway. Mogstad and his coauthors show that there is substantial variation in judge leniency and that when a parent gets a more lenient judge in an appeal, not only is that parent more likely to end up on DI (the first stage) but the DI participation of the adult children of that parent increases substantially (by 12 percentage points over the next decade), with suggestive evidence indicating that the intergenerational transmission is generated by changes in children’s beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get onto DI. More recently, Mogstad has further exploited detailed administrative data and the random assignment of appellant judges for DI in Norway combined with a rich dynamic model of household behavior to provide a more convincing assessment of the welfare consequences of DI programs and the impacts on family labor supply (with David Autor, Andreas Kostøl, and Bradley Setzler, American Economic Review, 2019). Mogstad’s work (with Gordon Dahl and Katrine Løken, American Economic Review, 2014) cleverly uses a regression discontinuity to estimate causal peer effects for coworkers in program participation in paid paternity leave in Norway, finding substantial impacts that are likely driven by information transmission and that snowball over time so that long-run participation effects are much greater than would have been expected from early take-up rates.Mogstad has made major contributions to our knowledge of how technological change impacts the labor market and to the estimation of the returns to human capital investments. Mogstad’s paper (with Anders Akerman and Ingvil Gaarder, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015) using variation across geographic regions of Norway in the timing of initial widespread access to high-speed (broadband) internet provides some of the most compelling causal evidence of how the organization of work and the demand for skills respond to large reductions in the cost of information technology. His paper “Field of Study, Earnings, and Self-Selection” (with Lars Kirkeboen and Edwin Leuven, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016) represents a significant methodological and substantive contribution using regression discontinuities in admission to specific field-school combinations along with information on students’ next-best alternatives in the centralized admission process to university degree programs in Norway to provide causal estimates of the economic returns to both field of study and institution quality. Mogstad (with Manudeep Bhuller and Kjell Salvanes, Journal of Labor Economics, 2017) has reexamined life-cycle returns to schooling with rich administrative longitudinal data from Norway and useful natural experiments in schooling variation to allow some relaxation of the assumptions in the standard Mincerian human capital earnings function. Mogstad and his coauthors show that accounting for work and earnings during school and a steeper age-earnings profile with more schooling is important to accurately estimate lifetime returns to schooling.Mogstad’s recent work has made great progress on crucial issues in empirical methodology for labor economists, including the use of instrumental variables to make inferences about policy-relevant parameters (with Andres Santos and Alexander Torgovitsky, Econometrica, 2019). He also is doing pioneering work on integrating more complete models of the labor market with frictions and heterogeneity in workplace amenities across employers into the estimation of firm and worker effects on wages using longitudinal matched employer-employee data and addressing econometric problems related to limited mobility bias.These examples illustrate the remarkable breadth and depth of Mogstad’s contributions to labor economics. His work is a model for young applied economists, and he also has been a superb mentor to young scholars in labor economics. The Society of Labor Economists is delighted to honor Magne Mogstad with the Sherwin Rosen Prize.2020 Nominating Committee:Christian DustmannChinhui JuhnLawrence Katz (chair)Patrick KlineClaudia Olivetti Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 38, Number 3July 2020 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709572 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Informational asymmetries between employers may inhibit optimal worker mobility. However, researchers rarely observe shocks to employers’ information. I exploit two school districts’ adoptions of value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness—informational shocks to some, but not all, employers—to provide direct tests of asymmetric employer learning. I develop a learning model and test its predictions for teacher mobility. I find that adopting VA increases within-district mobility of high-VA teachers, while low-VA teachers move out of district to uninformed principals. These patterns are consistent with asymmetric employer learning. This sorting from widespread VA adoption exacerbates inequality in access to effective teaching.

We investigate the effect of Head Start on education and wage income for individuals in their 30s in the NLSY79. We contribute to the existing literature by examining effects across outcome distributions, using an approach that relies on two weak stochastic dominance assumptions that can be checked using pre–Head Start cohorts. We find that Head Start has positive and statistically significant effects on years of education and wage income. We also uncover important heterogeneity in the program’s effectiveness; the effects are concentrated at the lower end of the distribution, and the effects are strongest for women, blacks, and Hispanics.

We study how parental leave benefit levels affect household labor supply, family income, and child outcomes, exploiting the speed premium (SP) in the Swedish leave system. The SP grants mothers higher benefits for a subsequent child without reestablishing eligibility through market work if two births occur within a prespecified interval. We use the spacing eligibility cutoffs in a regression discontinuity framework and find that the SP improves educational outcomes of the older child but not those of the younger. Impacts are likely driven by increased maternal time and the quality of maternal time relative to the counterfactual mode of care.

This paper examines whether the introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany affected immigrant children’s educational outcomes at the first three stages of the education system: preschool, primary school, and secondary school. Using a birth date cutoff as a source of exogenous variation, we find that the policy (i) increased immigrant children’s participation in noncompulsory preschool education, (ii) had positive effects on key developmental outcomes measured at the end of the preschool period, (iii) caused immigrant children to progress faster through primary school, and (iv) increased the likelihood of them attending the academic track of secondary school.

On the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, high-wage job postings unexpectedly attract fewer applicants, and this is the case even within a detailed occupation. Viewed through the lens of our directed search model, this negative relationship is indicative of substantial applicant heterogeneity within an occupation. Empirically, we find that job title heterogeneity is key: within a job title, jobs with 10% higher wages do attract 7.7% more applicants. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with a higher return to worker quality for hires in “manager” and “senior” job titles. Overall, our findings demonstrate the power of words in the matching process.

Little is known about the role birth order plays in delinquency and adult crime outcomes that carry significant externalities. We use rich data sets from Denmark and Florida to examine these outcomes and explore potential mechanisms. Despite large environmental differences between the areas, we find remarkably consistent results: in families with two or more children, secondborn boys are 20%–40% more likely to be disciplined in school and enter the criminal justice system than are their firstborn male siblings. We rule out health at birth and school quality as mechanisms but find evidence for the role of parental time investment.