This paper investigates the impact of ¡§learning-by-producing¡¨ on inventive activity and shows that, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak during the...

Does screening applicants using exams help or hurt the chances of lower-SES candidates? Because individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fare, on average, worse than those from richer backgrounds in standardized tests, a common concern with this "meritocratic" approach is that it might...

Urban change involves transformations in the physical appearance and the social composition of neighborhoods. Yet, the relationship between the physical and social components of urban change is not well understood due to the lack of comprehensive measures of neighborhood appearance. Here, we...

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change,...

This paper investigates three hypotheses to account for the observed shifts in U.S. relative wages of less educated compared to more educated workers between 1967 and 1992: increased import competition, changes in the relative supplies of labor of different education levels and changes in...

We develop a new estimator for the process of children's skill formation in which children's skills endogenously develop according to a dynamic latent factor structure. Rather than assuming skills are measured perfectly by a particular measure, we accommodate the variety of skills measures used...

One of the productive activities engaging the work force is reorganizing. When factors of production are better matched, productivity is higher. The probabilistic matching model of Diamond, Mortensen, and others provides a way to make the idea of reorganization precise. Because the flow of...

Youth employment has been near historic lows in recent years, and racial gaps persist. This paper tests whether information frictions limit young people's labor market success with a field experiment involving over 43,000 youth in New York City. We build software that allows employers to quickly...

I study age discrimination in hiring, exploiting a difference between age-revealed and partially age-blind hiring procedures. Under the first hiring procedure, age is revealed simultaneously with other applicant information and job offer rates are much lower for older than for younger job...