I use panel data to examine whether long‐term changes in industry wages are positively related to long‐term changes in industry employment. Previous research using repeated cross‐sectional data found no systematic relationship between these variables. Using standard fixed effects models to deal with individual heterogeneity, I find a robust positive relationship between changes in composition‐constant industry wages and industry employment. This suggests that growing industries attract less skilled individuals in a manner that biases down the estimated relationship between industry employment and wages in repeated cross‐sectional data. The results imply that supply curves facing industries are elastic but upward sloping.

In this article, I evaluate the hypothesis that firms respond to negative demand shocks by assigning workers to tasks that require less skill than the tasks they normally carry out. Using changes in employment in state‐industry cells as a measure of demand conditions facing individual firms, I provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis. Furthermore, the skill requirements of the tasks carried out by workers are procyclical. The results are consistent with a specific capital model where employers move workers between tasks so that layoffs are concentrated on workers with low levels of firm‐specific human capital.

We introduce two simple new variants of the jackknife instrumental variables (JIVE) estimator for overidentified linear models and show that they are superior to the existing JIVE estimator, significantly improving on its small-sample-bias properties. We also compare our new estimators to existing Nagar (1959) type estimators. We show that, in models with heteroskedasticity, our estimators have superior properties to both the Nagar estimator and the related B2SLS estimator suggested in Donald and Newey (2001). These theoretical results are verified in a set of Monte Carlo experiments and then applied to estimating the returns to schooling using actual data.

Much evidence suggests that having more education leads to higher earnings in the labor market. However, there is little evidence about whether having more education causes employees to experience lower earnings volatility or shelters them from the adverse effects of recessions. We use a large British administrative panel data set to study the impact of the 1972 increase in compulsory schooling on earnings volatility over the life cycle. Our estimates suggest that men exposed to the law change subsequently had lower earnings variability and less procyclical earnings. However, there is little evidence that education affects earnings volatility of older men.

We investigate whether acquiring more primary education has long-term effects on risk-taking behavior in financial markets. Using exogenous variation in education from a compulsory schooling change combined with wealth data for the Swedish population, we estimate the effect of education on stock market participation and on the share of financial wealth invested in stocks, conditional on participation. For men, an extra year of education increases market participation by two percentage points and the share of financial wealth allocated to stocks by 10%. We find suggestive evidence that greater financial wealth is a potential channel through which education increases participation, consistent with the existence of fixed costs. Lower risk aversion is a potential channel through which education increases the stock share. The reform has less effect on female schooling attainment and there is no evidence that this additional education affects women’s asset allocation. There is no evidence of spillovers to children.

Teenage peers are perceived as being important, but there is little conclusive evidence demonstrating this. This paper uses data on the population of Norway and idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition within schools to examine the role of peer composition in ninth grade on longer-run outcomes such as IQ scores, teenage childbearing, education, and labor market outcomes. We find that outcomes are influenced by the proportion of females in the grade, and these effects differ by gender. Average age and average mother’s education of peers have little impact on teenagers but average father’s earnings of peers matters for boys.

Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents. Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors and we find little evidence that nature/nurture interactions are important. When bequests are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth. We further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility, looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method. We find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth-related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital. We conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that, like wealth, it is more determined by environment than by biology.

There is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family. However, there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory. Using a rich dataset on the entire population of Norway over an extended period of time, we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children. While we find a negative correlation between family size and children's education, when we include indicators for birth order and/or use twin births as an instrument, family size effects become negligible. In addition, birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children's education. We also study adult earnings, employment, and teenage childbearing, and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes, particularly among women. These findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child "production", focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well.

Why the Apple Doesn't Fall Far: Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital by Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux and Kjell G. Salvanes. Published in volume 95, issue 1, pages 437-449 of American Economic Review, March 2005