We study the effects of occupational licensing on consumer choices and market outcomes in a large online platform for residential home services. We exploit exogenous variation in the time at which licenses are displayed on the platform to identify the causal effects of licensing information on...

In this paper, we provide some of the first empirical evidence of whether early occupational choices are associated with lasting effects on health status, affecting individuals as they age. We take advantage of data on occupational histories available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...

We investigate the role of mechanical ability as another dimension that, jointly with cognitive and socio-emotional, affects schooling decisions and labor market outcomes. Using a Roy model with a factor structure and data from the NLSY79, we show that the labor market positively rewards...

The long-standing view in US economic history is the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the artisan shop to the mechanized factory led to "labor deskilling." Craft workers were displaced by mix of semi-skilled operatives, unskilled workers, and a reduced force of mechanics to...

A critical impediment to research on school-to-work programs has been the absence of large representative data sets with information on such programs. In contrast, the new NLSY (NLSY97) offers researchers opportunities to analyze direct evidence on school-to-work programs. In the NLSY97,...

We follow the labor market outcomes of applicants who were randomized into job training a year and a half before the pandemic through the subsequent economic turmoil that resulted from COVID-19. Despite persistently improved labor market outcomes of training participants prior to March 2020, we...

This paper analyzes economic behavior and the effects of training and income support policies in the low wage labor market for women. The opportunity set takes account of nonlinearities and discontinuities associated with career interruption, part-time work, and government programs. There are...

Changes in the skill differential are often used by economic historians to proxy changes in income inequality. According to Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert, American skill differentials rose sharply between 1820 and 1860, which they interpret as increasing income inequality. Using a large,...

In this paper we estimate variants of a labor demand equation derived from a (restricted variable) cost function in which "experience"on a technology (proxied by the mean age of the capital stock) enters "non-neutrally." Our specification of the underlying cost function isbased on the hypothesis...