I briefly review the emergence of “ design-based” research methods in labor economics in the 1980s and early 1990s. These methods were seen as a partial solution to the problems of credible inference identified by Ashenfelter (1974), Leamer (1978), Hendry (1980), and others. Designed-based studies typically use a simplified one-equation model of the outcome of interest—in contrast to model-based studies that specify a data generating process for all factors determining the outcome. I discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the design-based approach and the value of such research in the field. (JEL C20, J01, J24, J31, J38, J51, J53)

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the elasticity of firm-specific labor supply. A growing consensus is that firms have some wage-setting power, though many questions remain about the sources of that power. (JEL B21, D21, D24, D43, J22, J31, J42)

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.

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.