The purpose of this paper is to examine these concerns and evaluate the use of job satisfaction (and other subjective variables) in labor market analysis. The main theme is that, while there are good reasons to treat subjective variables gingerly, the answers to questions about how people feel...

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps have weakened over time. Here, we explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work they do. We run...

The study examines US-European productivity and worker attitude differences, focusing on changes in incentive structures. We analyze productivity and worker attitudes in five plants in the UK and US belonging to the same multinational producer of automotive sensors and actuators. We examine the...

We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life-course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). Data from immigrants as well as...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor structure, we provide new identification results...

A recent and growing area of research applies latent factor models to study the development of children's skills. Some normalization is required in these models because the latent variables have no natural units and no known location or scale. We show that the standard practice of...

We extend the control function approach of Altonji and Mansfield (2018) to allow for multiple group levels and complementarities. Our analysis provides a foundation for causal interpretation of multilevel mixed effects models in the presence of sorting. In our empirical application, we obtain...

Factors estimated from large macroeconomic panels are being used in an increasing number of applications. However, little is known about how the size and the composition of the data affect the factor estimates. In this paper, we question whether it is possible to use more series to extract the...

When excess returns are used to estimate linear stochastic discount factor (SDF) models, researchers often adopt a normalization of the SDF that sets its mean to 1, or one that sets its intercept to 1. These normalizations are often treated as equivalent, but they are subtly different both in...