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Working Paper
Imperfect information, self-selection and the market for higher education
This paper explores how the steady trends in increasing tuition costs, college enrollment, and the college wage gap might be related to the quality of college graduates. The model shows that the signaling role of education might be an important yet largely neglected ingredient in these recent changes. I develop a special signaling model in which workers of heterogeneous abilities face the same costs, yet a larger proportion of able individuals self-select to attend college since they are more likely to get higher returns. With imperfect information, the skill premium is an outcome which ...
Working Paper
Unemployment insurance and the uninsured
Under federal-state law workers who quit a job are not entitled to receive unemployment insurance benefits. To show how the existence of the uninsured affects wages and employment, I extend an equilibrium search model to account for two types of unemployed workers: those who are currently receiving unemployment benefits and for whom an increase in unemployment benefits reduces the incentive to work, and those who are currently not insured. For these, work provides an added value in the form of future eligibility, and an increase in unemployment benefits increases their willingness to work. ...
Journal Article
Labor force participation and the prospects for U.S. growth
This Economic Letter reviews the factors contributing to the projected slower pace of labor force growth over the next decade and focuses in particular on the challenges and uncertainties surrounding one aspect, labor force participation behavior.
Working Paper
Gender ratios at top PhD programs in economics
Analyzing university faculty and graduate student data for the top-ten U.S. economics departments between 1987 and 2007, we find that there are persistent differences in gender composition for both faculty and graduate students across institutions and that the share of female faculty and the share of women in the entering PhD class are positively correlated. We find, using instrumental variables analysis, robust evidence that this correlation is driven by the causal effect of the female faculty share on the gender composition of the entering PhD class. This result provides an explanation for ...
Journal Article
Assessing employment growth in 2007
This Economic Letter discusses the sources of the recent discrepancy between two employment growth data series produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Journal Article
Changes in income inequality across the U.S.
Over the past four decades, overall income inequality has increased in the U.S. One particularly striking feature of the data is that the income gap has widened most between the top and the middle of the distribution, while it has remained relatively stable between the middle and the bottom. The causal forces behind the increase in inequality have been a topic of much debate among the public, the media, and policymakers, as well as a rich field of research for economists. ; We examine income trends at the county level between 1990 and 2000. Basing our analysis on leading theories of the ...