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...

We use the labor market for doctorates in the biomedical sciences, where career dislocation is common, as a case study of skill-task mismatch and its consequences. Using longitudinal, worker-level data on biomedical doctorates, we investigate mismatch as an explanation for the negative pecuniary...

Performance pay in general amounts to only a small fraction of total pay. In this paper, we show that performance pay is nevertheless important for the level and dynamics of wages over the life cycle because of the incentives it indirectly provides for human capital acquisition and because of...

Investment fund managers make asset allocation decisions on behalf of a significant segment of US households. To elucidate the incentives they operate under, as well as the income and career risks they face, we construct a unique and novel dataset, which encompasses detailed information on the...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, Seniority. Based on a database of over 5 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in job titles and how long they take to attain. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, inference benefits from the use of...

Licensed workers could be shielded from unemployment during recession since occupational licensing laws are asymmetric--making unlicensed workers an illegal substitute for licensed workers but not the reverse. We test our hypothesis using a difference-in-differences event study research design...

Professions play a key role in determining the division of labor and the returns to skilled work. This paper studies the productivity difference between physicians and nurse practitioners (NPs), two health care professions performing overlapping tasks but with stark differences in background,...

In this paper, we survey non-competitive theories of training. With competitive labor markets, firms never pay for investments in general training, whereas when labor markets are imperfect, firm-sponsored training arises as an equilibrium phenomenon. We discuss a variety of evidence which...