Search Results
Journal Article
Worker skills must expand to meet long-term demands
Journal Article
A leaner, more skilled U.S. manufacturing workforce
While the U.S. manufacturing sector has contracted sharply since the early 1980s, employment in high-skill manufacturing occupations has risen by an impressive 37 percent. An investigation of the growth in high-skill manufacturing jobs reveals that virtually all of the nation's industries have shared in this trend. Moreover, skill upgrading has occurred in all parts of the country, even those experiencing severe employment losses.
Journal Article
Investing in the front line or the new art of cutting metal
Working Paper
Do returns to schooling differ by race and ethnicity?
Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the National Longitudinal Surveys, we find little evidence of differences in the return to schooling across racial and ethnic groups, even with attempts to control for ability and measurement error biases. While our point estimates are relatively similar across racial and ethnic groups, our conclusion is driven in part by relatively large standard errors. ; That said, we find no evidence that returns to schooling are lower for African Americans or Hispanics than for non-minorities. As a result, policies that increase education among the ...
Conference Paper
Educating managers and employees
Journal Article
Government-subsidized training: a plan for prosperity?
Many analysts believe that the United States should subsidize training to increase its workers' skills because employers don't provide enough. This Commentary asks whether the present level of training is truly insufficient, or whether firms' incentives may already be in synch with the social costs and benefits of training.
Newsletter
Explaining the decline in teen labor force participation
Fewer teenagers are participating in the labor force today than at any point since WWII. At just under 44%, teen labor force participation is 15 percentage points below its peak in the late 1970s. Why has there been a long-run secular decline in the work activity of young adults, and why has it sharply accelerated in the last five years?
Working Paper
Learning by doing and the value of optimal experimentation
Research on learning-by-doing has typically been restricted to cases where estimation and control can be treated separately. Recent work has provided convergence results for more general learning problems where experimentation is an important aspect of optimal control. However the associated optimal policy cannot be derived analytically because Bayesian learning introduces a nonlinearity in the dynamic programming problem. This paper characterizes the optimal policy numerically and shows that it incorporates a substantial degree of experimentation. Dynamic simulations indicate that optimal ...