Since the seminal work of Stigler in 1962, economists have recognized that information is costly to acquire and leads to “search frictions.” Growth in online search has lowered the cost of information acquisition. We analyze the expansion of the website Craigslist, which allows users to post...

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...