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...

Most of our productive knowledge was handed down to us by previous generations. The transfer of knowledge from the old to the young is therefore a cornerstone of productivity growth. We study this process in a model in which the old sell knowledge to the young - - old workers train the young,...

Much of the current discussion promoting apprenticeship programs in the U.S. proceeds as if it is simply a matter of historical accident or lack of imagination which has hindered human capital investment by U.S. firms. However, the cause may be rooted more deeply in our labor market...

Using information on time costs of training and gains in wages attributable to training I computed rates of return on training investments. The range of estimates based on several data sets generally exceeds the magnitudes of rates of return usually observed for schooling investments. It is not...

Although economic models of training decisions are framed in terms of a company's calculation of the costs and benefits of such training, empirical work has never been able to test this model directly on company behavior. This paper utilizes a unique database to analyze the determinants of the...

We use cross-national harmonized micro data from a broad sample of developed and developing countries and investigate the heterogeneity of the effect of entry, contract enforcement regulation, and financial development on both the decision to become an entrepreneur and the level of employment of...

We document three new facts about entrepreneurship. First, a majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers' industry of employment. Second, this tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow...

A critical impediment to research on school-to-work programs has been the absence of large representative data sets with information on such programs. In contrast, the new NLSY (NLSY97) offers researchers opportunities to analyze direct evidence on school-to-work programs. In the NLSY97,...

We investigate the problem of predicting the average effect of a new training program using experiences with previous implementations. There are two principal complications in doing so. First, the population in which the new program will be implemented may differ from the population in which the...