Immigration policy in most high-income countries is designed to promote qualified migration while maintaining high requirements on characteristics such as education and language skills. We rely on a standard self-selection model with heterogeneous migration costs to discuss the effect of access...

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic...

Concurrent with the precipitous decline in private sector unionization over the past half century, there has been a shift in the type of work covered by unions. We take a skill-based approach to studying this shift, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific...

Many agricultural and environmental technologies require large upfront investments in exchange for longer-term benefits. This time profile of costs and benefits makes adoption particularly sensitive to liquidity and credit constraints, which are prevalent in low-income settings. We test the...

I examine the effects of occupational licensing on the quality of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). I exploit the staggered adoption of the 150-hour rule, which increases the educational requirements for a CPA license. The analysis shows that the rule decreases the number of entrants into the...

Job choice by high-skilled foreign-born workers in the US correlates strongly with country of origin. We apply a Frechet-Roy model of occupational choice to evaluate the causes of immigrant sorting. In a gravity specification, we find that revealed comparative advantage in the US is stronger for...

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student and degree quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities and tax authorities. We analyse two measures of match at the university-subject level: undergraduate enrollment qualifications, and graduate earnings. We...

We fully solve an assignment problem with heterogeneous firms and multiple heterogeneous workers whose skills are imperfect substitutes, that is, when production is submodular. We show that sorting is neither positive nor negative and is characterized sufficiently by two regions. In the first...

We develop a tractable general equilibrium model for understanding within- and between-occupation changes in skill use over time. We apply the model to skill-use measures from the third, fourth, and revised fourth editions of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and data from the 1960, 1970,...