This paper assesses the relative importance of various explanations for the gender gap in career outcomes for highly-educated workers in the U.S. corporate and financial sectors. The careers of MBAs, who graduated between 1990 and 2006 from a top U.S. business school, are studied to understand...

The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly-funded secondary school education and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus here is on the reasons for the high school movement' in American generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly...

The labor force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop. Its þ-shape is revealed both across the process of economic development and through the histories of currently advanced countries. The initial decline in the participation rate is due to the...

In the past two decades gender pay differences have narrowed considerably and a declining significance of gender has pervaded the labor market in numerous ways. This paper contends that in the first several decades of the twentieth century there was a rising significance of gender. The emergence...

Recent college graduate women express frustration regarding the obstacles they will face in combining career and family. Tracing the demographic and labor force experiences of four cohorts of college women across the past century allows us to observe the choices each made and how the constraints...

The U.S. wage structure evolved across the last century: narrowing from 1910 to 1950, fairly stable in the 1950s and 1960s, widening rapidly during the 1980s, and "polarizing" since the late 1980s. We document the spectacular rise of U.S. wage inequality after 1980 and place recent changes into...

A new state-level series on secondary-school data demonstrates that graduation and enrollment rates increased greatly in the 1920s and 1930s in most regions. An 18-year old male in 1910 had just a 10% chance of having a high school diploma but by the mid-1930s the median 18-year old male was a...

In October 1993, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to Robert William Fogel and Douglass Cecil North `for having renewed research in economic history.' The Academy noted that `they were pioneers in the branch of economic history that has been called the...

Pharmacy has become a female-majority profession that is highly remunerated with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion relative to other occupations. We sketch a labor market framework based on the theory of equalizing differences to integrate and interpret our empirical...

We study employers’ perceptions of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector (for-profit vs. public) and selectivity of institution to fictitious resumes and send them to real vacancy postings on a large online job board. We find that a bachelor’s degree...