We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. The current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites, and...

The employer-learning literature finds support for statistical discrimination on the basis of schooling. How economically relevant statistical discrimination is depends on how fast employers learn about workers’ productive types. This article is the first to estimate the speed of employer...