Women used to lag behind but now exceed men in college enrollment. This paper shows that examining occupations which require only a high school degree ("non-college" occupations) can help resolve two puzzles related to this phenomenon. First, why do women attend college at greater rates than men...

In the last decades the US economy experienced a rise in female labor force participation, a reversal of the gender education gap and a closing of the gender wage gap. Importantly, these changes occurred at a substantially different pace over time. During the same period, workers in the US faced...

This paper examines how policies, aimed at increasing the supply of education in the economy, affect the matching between workers and firms, and the wages of various skill groups. We build an equilibrium model where workers endogenously invest in education, while firms direct their technology...

This paper explores how non-college occupations contributed to the gender gap in college enrollment, where women overtook men in college-going. Using instrumental variation from routinization, we show that the decline of routine-intensive occupations displaced the non-college occupations of...

This paper uses data from the American Life Panel to understand the determinants of well-being in the United States during the Great Recession. It investigates how various dimensions of subjective wellbeing reflected in the OECD Better Life Framework impact subjective well-being. The results...

Life is quite good in the United States compared to other OECD countries, thanks to strong economic growth and technological progress having lifted average income to high levels. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the benefits from growth have not been sufficiently broad based. Self-reported...

This paper studies the effects of firms' investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) on their demand for female and skilled workers. Using the gradual liberalization of the broadband Internet sector across provinces from 2006 to 2009 as a source of exogenous variation to...

Using data from social security records and an event study approach, we estimate the child penalty in Spain, looking at disparities for women and men across different labor outcomes following the birth of the first child. Our findings show that, the year after the first child is born, mothers’...

Using a multi-dimensional measure of occupational mismatch, we report distinct gender differences in match quality and changes in match quality over the course of careers. A substantial portion of the gender wage gap stems from match quality differences among more educated individuals....

How do temporary spells of absence from work affect individuals' labor trajectory? To answer this question, we augment a 'wage ladder' model, in which individuals receive alternative take-it-or-leave-it wage offers from firms and potentially suffer accidents which may push them into temporary...