Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey, we examine the effect of order-preserving scale transformations...

Partly in response to increased testing and accountability, states and districts have been raising the minimum school entry age, but existing studies show mixed results regarding the effects of entry age. These studies may be severely biased because they violate the monotonicity assumption...

We show that increasing the probability of obtaining a job offer through a network should raise the observed wages of workers in jobs found through formal channels relative to those in jobs found through the network. This prediction holds at all percentiles except the highest and lowest. The...

Using data from three cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, we investigate whether there were adverse consequences of teenage childbearing in the 1950s and 1960s, when most abortions were illegal, and access to the pill was limited. We find negative effects of teen motherhood on the...

We develop a tractable general equilibrium model for understanding within- and between-occupation changes in skill use over time. We apply the model to skill-use measures from the third, fourth, and revised fourth editions of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and data from the 1960, 1970,...

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing...

Most models of implicit lifetime contracts imply that at any particular point in time, workers' wages and value of marginal product (VMP) will diverge. As a result, the contract will have to specify hours as well as wages, since firms will desire to prevent workers from working more when the...

This paper examines nonsequential search when jobs vary with respect to nonpecuniary characteristics. In the presence of frictions in the labor market, the equilibrium job distribution need not show evidence of compensating wage differentials. The model also generates several pervasive features...