This paper explores how the wage and career consequences of motherhood differ by skill and timing. Past work has often found smaller or even negligible effects from childbearing for high-skill women, but we find the opposite. Wage trajectories diverge sharply for high scoring women after, but...

We study the effects of on-the-job skill accumulation on average hours worked by age and the volatility of hours over the life cycle in a calibrated general equilibrium model. Two forms of skill accumulation are considered: learning by doing and on-the-job training. In our economy with learning...

Why is unemployment higher for younger individuals? We address this question in a frictional model of the labor market that features learning about occupational fit. In order to learn the occupation in which they are most productive, workers sample occupations over their careers. Because young...

Economists have examined the impact of labor market regulations on the level of employment. However, there are many reasons to suspect that the impact of regulations differs across types of workers. In this paper we take advantage of the unusual large variance in labor policy in Chile to exa...

This paper examines the tradeoff between early and late specialization in the context of higher education. While some educational systems require students to specialize early by choosing a major field of study prior to entering university, others allow students to postpone this choice. I develop...

This paper uses data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) to examine the patterns of selection of male, Mexican migrants to the United States. We confirm previous findings that Mexican migrants are selected from the middle of the education distribution, but show that there is no evidence...

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we...

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men's football and men's basketball programs. We...

Game theory makes strong predictions about how individuals should behave in two player, zero sum games. When players follow a mixed strategy, equilibrium payoffs should be equalized across actions, and choices should be serially uncorrelated. Laboratory experiments have generated large and...

We investigate the hot hand hypothesis using detailed data on free throws and field goal attempts for the 2004-2005 through 2015-2016 NBA regular seasons. Free throws represent a more controlled setting, allowing a closer examination of the potential physiological mechanisms behind success in...