This paper establishes the presence of a substantial gender gap in the relationship between state legislature service and the subsequent pursuit of a Congressional career. The empirical approach uses a sample of mixed-gender elections to compare the differential political career progression of...

Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability...

Using quarterly data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. Moreover, the proportion of total hires that involves a career change for the worker also drops in recessions....

We analyse the pattern of work and other labour market states, such as unemployment and out-of-labour-force, over the life course, by making use of a long retrospective panel of older Europeans. Based on stochastic simulations of a reduced form transition probability model, we document to what...

Gender peer effects are potentially important for optimally organizing schools and neighborhoods. In this paper, we examine how the gender of classmates and neighbors affects a variety of high school outcomes and choice of university major. Given that students are assigned to schools based on...

In this paper we estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings in Europe, by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals who had access to many or few books at age ten. We instrument years of education using reforms of...

How much does your neighbor impact your test scores and career? In this paper, we examine how an observable characteristic of same-age neighbors their gender affects a variety of high school and university outcomes. We exploit randomness in the gender composition of local cohorts at birth from...