This paper tests some empirical implications of the general human capital model's explanation of rising wage profiles. At the individual level, the model implies that there will be a negative relationship between the initial wage level and wage growth of young, inexperienced workers. At the...

Understanding how productivity varies with age is important for a variety of reasons. A decline in productivity with age implies that aging societies must increasingly depend on the labor supply of the young and middle age. It also means that policies designed to keep the elderly in the work...

A large body of work has highlighted the importance of employment reallocation as a driver of aggregate productivity growth, but there is little direct evidence on the extent and nature of this process at the worker-firm level. We use an administrative matched employer-employee census for Chile...

A robust body of evidence shows that air pollution exposure is detrimental to health outcomes, often measured as deaths and hospitalizations. This literature has focused less on subclinical channels that nonetheless impact behavior, performance, and skills. This article reviews the economic...

Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster...

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and six proxies for industry rates of technological change, we study the impact of technological change on skill accumulation among young male workers in the manufacturing sector during the time period 1987 through 1992. Production workers...

We examine the implications of local externalities in human capital investment for the size and composition of the productive labor force. The model links residential choice, skills acquisition, and production in a city composed of several communities. Peer effects induce self-segregation by...