This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at...

We document the representation of female economists on the conference programs at the NBER Summer Institute from 2001 to 2016. Over the 2013-16 period, women made up 20.6 percent of all authors on scheduled papers. However, there was large dispersion across programs, with the share of female...

We create a novel measure of job search effort starting in 1994 by exploiting the overlap between the Current Population Survey and the American Time Use Survey. We examine the cyclical behavior of aggregate job search effort using time series and cross-state variation and find that it is...

We study how peer beliefs shape individual attitudes toward maternal labor supply using realistic hypothetical scenarios that elicit recommendations on the labor supply choices of a mother with a young child and an information treatment embedded within representative surveys. Across the...

This paper presents four policy options to make Social Security sustainable under the coming demographic shift: 1) increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, 2) reduce the replacement rates of the benefit formula by one-third, 3) raise the normal retirement age from sixty-six to...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of jobs that vary in their attributes (such as earnings and job hours flexibility) and asked to state their probabilistic choices. We...

We study the evolution of individual labor earnings over the life cycle, using a large panel data set of earnings histories drawn from U.S. administrative records. Using fully nonparametric methods, our analysis reaches two broad conclusions. First, earnings shocks display substantial deviations...

The limited nature of data on employment referrals in large business and household surveys has so far impeded our efforts to understand the relationships among employment referrals, match quality, wage trajectories, and turnover. Using a new firm-level data set that includes explicit information...