Knowledge that Transforms

Recent work situates gender norms as a key driver of the sexual division of labor. But the explanatory power of Becker’s comparative advantage explanation is still not well understood. Drawing on unique data, we test the predictions of a formal Beckerian model. We complement this by proposing and analyzing new measures of specialization. We show that comparative advantage plays little or no role in the sexual division of labor within couple households. Absolute advantage also plays no role in specialization for same-sex couples, and this is not explained by having fewer children.

Firms often impose constraints on working hours. While many believe that these constraints shape labor supply decisions, little evidence exists to support such views. We explore this relationship using linked employer-employee data on hours worked and the variation in tax rates derived from the 2010 Danish tax reform. We show that hours worked are unresponsive to individual tax changes in firms with strict constraints, whereas they respond to these changes, directly and through spillovers, in firms with looser constraints. Starting from these findings, we discuss the determinants of hours constraints, distinguishing between firms’ technologies and coordination of hours among coworkers.

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student and degree quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities, and tax authorities. We analyze two measures of match at the university subject level: undergraduate enrollment qualifications and graduate earnings. We find for both that disadvantaged students match to lower-quality degrees across the entire distribution of achievement in a setting with uniform fees and a generous financial aid system. While there are negligible gender gaps in academic match, high-attaining women systematically undermatch in terms of expected earnings, driven by subject choice. These inequalities in match are largest among the most undermatched.

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers’ provision of safety—something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We study the US metals mining sector, leveraging exogenous demand shocks from short-term variation in global commodity prices. We find that positive price shocks substantially increase workplace injury rates and safety regulation noncompliance. While these results indicate the general dominance of the opportunity cost effect, shocks that only increase mines’ cash flow lower injury rates, illustrating that financial constraints also affect safety.

School quality affects upward mobility in educational attainment. This conclusion comes from an analysis of families with coresident teenage children in the 1940 census. We study parents in the bottom quartile of the education distribution and define “upward mobility” as a generational move up the educational ladder to the top three quartiles of the child’s cohort. At the state level, upward mobility is strongly tied to teacher wages. This relationship holds when we narrow our focus to families on adjacent sides of state borders in the South, where state minimum salary laws created sharp teacher-wage differences between otherwise similar counties.

Using College and Beyond data and a variant of Dale and Krueger’s matched-applicant approach, we revisit the question of how attending an elite college affects later-life outcomes. We expand the scope by examining additional outcomes and not restricting the sample to full-time workers. For men, controlling for selection eliminates the relationship between college selectivity and earnings; there are also no effects on men’s educational attainment or family outcomes. We find significant effects for women: attending a school with a 100-point-higher average SAT score increases women’s probability of advanced degree attainment and earnings while reducing their likelihood of marriage.

We present the first analysis of the effect of grade retention on adult criminal convictions, exploiting test cutoffs for ninth-grade promotion in Louisiana. Eighth-grade retention increases the likelihood of violent crime conviction by 1.05 percentage points (58.44%) and increases the number of violent crime convictions at first conviction. The effects are likely driven by declines in high school peer quality and reduced educational investments that result in lower noncognitive skill acquisition. Extrapolating effects away from the cutoff shows that our results are generalizable to a larger group of low-performing students and are evident for both property and drug crimes.

We study the relationships between ageist stereotypes - as reflected in the language used in job ads - and age discrimination in hiring, exploiting the text of job ads and differences in callbacks to older and younger job applicants from a resume (correspondence study) field experiment (Neumark, Burn, and Button, 2019). Our analysis uses computational linguistics and machine learning methods to examine, in a field-experiment setting, ageist stereotypes that might underlie age discrimination in hiring. In so doing, we develop methods and a framework for analyzing textual data, highlighting the usefulness of various computer science techniques for empirical economics research. We find evidence that language related to stereotypes of older workers sometimes predicts discrimination against older workers. For men, we find evidence that age stereotypes about all three categories we consider - health, personality, and skill - predict age discrimination, and for women, age stereotypes about personality predict age discrimination. In general, the evidence that age stereotypes predict age discrimination is much stronger for men, and our results for men are quite consistent with the industrial psychology literature on age stereotypes.

We assess the effect of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes. First, we apply modern machine learning tools to predict who is affected by the policy. Second, we implement an event study using 172 prominent minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2019. We find a clear increase in wages of affected workers and no change in employment. Furthermore, minimum wage increases have no effect on the unemployment rate, labor force participation, or labor market transitions. Overall, these findings provide little evidence of changing search effort in response to a minimum wage increase.

Little is known about the costs of crime to victims. We use unique and detailed register data on victimizations and monthly labor market outcomes from the Netherlands and estimate event study designs to assess short- and long-term effects of criminal victimization. Across offenses, both males and females experience significant decreases in earnings (up to −12.9%) and increases in benefit receipt (up to +6%) after victimization. The negative labor market responses are lasting (up to 4 years) and accompanied by shorter-lived responses in health expenditure. Heterogeneity results suggest that most groups of victims, including the noninjured, suffer nontrivial losses.