The employer‐learning literature finds support for statistical discrimination on the basis of schooling. How economically relevant statistical discrimination is depends on how fast employers learn about workers’ productive types. This article is the first to estimate the speed of employer learning. Employers learn quickly. Initial expectation errors decline by 50% within 3 years. This estimate places an upper bound on the contribution of signaling. This bound varies with the speed of employer learning and with discount rate. For a wide range of parameter values, the contribution of signaling to the gains from schooling is less than 25%.

This study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the American South as a test of the quantity-quality (Q-Q) framework of fertility. Eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors: hookworm (i) depresses the return to human-capital investment, (ii) had a very low case-fatality rate, and (iii) had negligible prevalence among adults. Consistent with the Q-Q model, we find a significant decline in fertility associated with eradication. Relative sizes of fertility and human-capital responses to hookworm indicate that the Q-Q mechanism is of a similar magnitude to secular co-movements in these same variables.

We compare patterns of unemployment between Canada and the United States during the Great Recession. We document a rise in long-term unemployment in Canada, similar to findings in earlier work. We consider an extended matching model using restricted-access data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey, which contains information on time since last job for both unemployed and nonparticipants. We create a new historical vacancy series for Canada based on relative employment in “recruiting industries” to construct a monthly Beveridge curve for Canada. Allowing for duration dependence in flows between unemployment and nonparticipation is crucial for explaining long-term joblessness.

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.

This article studies the role of employer behavior in generating “negative duration dependence”—the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell—by sending fictitious résumés to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker’s unemployment spell, with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months. We explore how this effect varies with local labor market conditions and find that duration dependence is stronger when the local labor market is tighter. This result is consistent with the prediction of a broad class of screening models in which employers use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this signal is less informative in weak labor markets.

This paper considers the use of instruments to identify and estimate private and social returns to education within a model of employer learning. What an instrument identifies depends on whether it is hidden from, or transparent (i.e., observed ) to, the employers. A hidden instrument identifies private returns to education, and a transparent instrument identifies social returns to education. We use variation in compulsory schooling laws across noncentral and central municipalities in Norway to, respectively, construct hidden and transparent instruments. We estimate a private return of 7.9 percent, of which 70 percent is due to increased productivity and the remaining 30 percent is due to signaling.

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. The current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites, and women have gained relative to men. However, the skill distribution has widened overall. Shifts in parental education generate many of the observed changes. We also provide speculative estimates suggesting that if recent trends in technology and the supply of human capital continue, wage inequality will increase substantially by 2025.

By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children were more likely to have at least one child but chose to have smaller families overall. By contrast, women who themselves obtained more schooling due to the program delayed childbearing along both the extensive and intensive margins and entered higher quality occupations, consistent with education raising opportunity costs of child rearing.

We study how heterogeneity in performance evaluations across supervisors affects employee and supervisor careers and firm outcomes using data on the performance system of a Scandinavian service sector firm. Supervisors vary widely in how they rate subordinates of similar quality. In our model, this ratings heterogeneity can arise because supervisors can differ in their ability to manage subordinates or in their leniency when rating subordinates. Furthermore, firms might or might not be informed about this heterogeneity. The evidence suggests that supervisor heterogeneity stems, in part, from real differences in managerial ability that firms are partially informed about.