A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study...

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction - around 20% - of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the...

There is a growing body of research examining the labor market returns to college major, motivated by the large returns to skill in the labor market. Prior research has focused almost exclusively on mean effects and has paid little attention to the role of earnings growth and variability. Using...

We examine the effect of attending stand-alone technical high schools on the industry of employment and within industry earnings premiums using a regression discontinuity design. We study the universe of students that applied to the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System (CTECS)...

The high incidence of temporary agency employment among participants in government employment programs has catalyzed debate about whether these jobs help the poor transition into stable employment and out of poverty. We provide direct evidence on this question through analysis of a Michigan...

The close connection between US and China in scientific research and education in the 2000s produced a large group of China-born researchers who work in the US ("diaspora") and a larger group of China-born researchers who gained US-research experience and returned to do their research in China...

We show that time variation in risk premia leads to time-varying idiosyncratic income risk for workers. Using US administrative data on worker earnings, we show that increases in risk premia lead to lower earnings for low-wage workers; these declines are primarily driven by job separations. By...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are falling rapidly at present and, prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some...

A disproportionate share of low-skilled U.S. workers is employed by temporary-help firms. These firms offer rapid entry into paid employment, but temporary-help jobs are typically brief, and it is unknown whether they foster longer-term employment. We exploit a unique aspect of the city of...

A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two...