This paper extends the literature on monopsony and labor market concentration by taking a task-based approach and estimating the causal effect of concentration in the demand for skills on labor market outcomes. The prior literature has focused on industry and occupation concentration and likely...

Concurrent with the precipitous decline in private sector unionization over the past half century, there has been a shift in the type of work covered by unions. We take a skill-based approach to studying this shift, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific...

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. Because e-cigarettes do not involve the combustion of tobacco, vaping offers the potential to prevent most of the health consequences of smoking. We study the impact of an information shock created by an outbreak of lung injuries...

Since the spring of 2021, nearly 700 colleges and universities in the U.S. have mandated that their students become vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. We leverage rich data on colleges' vaccination policies and semester start dates, along with a variety of county-level public health...

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...

The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. Recent policy proposals seek to address this problem by increasing government health care spending in order to reduce out-of-pocket costs. 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...

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the...

Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9% between 1990-2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in rich and poor U.S. areas and with...

Upon assuming power for the first time in 1935, the Norwegian Labour Party delivered on its promise of a major schooling reform. The reform raised minimum instruction time in less developed rural areas and boosted the resources available to rural schools, reducing class size and increasing...