Pharmacy today is a highly remunerated female-majority profession with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion. Using extensive surveys of pharmacists, as well as the US Census, American Community Surveys, and Current Population Surveys, we explore the gender earnings gap, penalty to part-time work, demographics of pharmacists relative to other college graduates, and evolution of the profession during the last half-century. Technological changes increasing substitutability among pharmacists, growth of pharmacy employment in retail chains and hospitals, and related decline of independent pharmacies reduced the penalty to part-time work and contribute to the narrow gender earnings gap in pharmacy.

We explore the role of composition, duration dependence, and labor force nonparticipation in accounting for the sharp increase in the incidence of long-term unemployment (LTU) during the Great Recession. We show that compositional shifts account for very little of the observed increase in LTU. Using panel data from the Current Population Survey for 2002–7, we calibrate a matching model that allows for duration dependence in unemployment and transitions between employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. The calibrated model accounts for almost all of the increase in LTU and much of the observed outward shift in the Beveridge curve between 2008 and 2013.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children’s long-term outcomes.

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a large online job board. We find that a business bachelor's degree from a for-profit online institution is 22 percent less likely to receive a callback than one from a nonselective public institution. In applications to health jobs, we find that for-profit credentials receive fewer callbacks unless the job requires an external quality indicator such as an occupational license.