How important to well-being is choosing a career with the right fit? We estimate a model of career choice in a setting where we observe the income risk of chosen careers and the risk aversion of the people who choose them. The key parameter of interest representing the importance of...

Recent research has documented a significant rise in the volatility (e.g., expected squared change) of individual incomes in the U.S. since the 1970s. Existing measures of this trend abstract from individual heterogeneity, effectively estimating an increase in average volatility. We decompose...

How important to well-being is choosing a career with the right fit? This question is difficult to answer because we observe individuals only in their chosen careers, not in the other (presumably inferior) options they did not choose. To overcome this problem, we use expected utility to...