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Working Paper
Occupational Choice, Retirement, and the Effects of Disability Insurance
There is much variation in the physical requirements across occupations, giving rise to great differences in later-life productivity, disability risk, and the value of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In this paper, I look at how such differences across occupations affect initial career choice as well as the extent to which SSDI, which insures shocks to productivity due to disability, prompts more people to choose physically intense occupations. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), I estimate a dynamic model of occupational ...
Working Paper
Local Labor Markets and Selection into the Teaching Profession
Using administrative data from Texas, I track individuals from high school through college to the workforce to determine the effects of local labor markets on occupational choice. I find local labor market conditions are countercyclical with selection into teaching and have a larger influence when experienced during high school. Individuals sorting into teaching because of poor local labor market conditions are of higher ability (standardized tests) and have higher productivity (value-added). The findings suggest that local labor market fluctuations shape career decisions well before ...
Working Paper
Long-Term Unemployment: Attached and Mismatched?
In this paper, I quantify the contribution of occupation-specific shocks and skills to unemployment duration and its cyclical dynamics. I quantify specific skills using microdata on wages, estimating occupational switching cost as a function of the occupations' difference in skills. The productivity shocks are consistent with job finding rates by occupation. For the period 1995-2013, the model captures 69.5% of long-term unemployment in the data, while a uniform finding rate delivers only 47.2%. In the Great Recession, the model predicts 72.9% of the long-term unemployment that existed in the ...
Working Paper
Occupational Switching During the Second Industrial Revolution
During the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of automation technologies coincided with substantial job creation but also a “hollowing out” of middle-skilled job opportunities, which historically offered reliable paths to prosperity. We use recently linked U.S. census data to document three main facts: (i) declining demand for middle-skilled labor in manufacturing corresponded to greater reallocation of workers into comparatively less-skilled occupations; (ii) older workers were more likely to switch to unskilled physical labor; (iii) younger ...
Working Paper
Occupational hazards and social disability insurance
Using retrospective data, we introduce evidence that occupational exposure significantly affects disability risk. Incorporating this into a general equilibrium model, social disability insurance (SDI) affects welfare through (i) the classic, risk-sharing channel and (ii) a new channel of occupational reallocation. Both channels can increase welfare, but at the optimal SDI they are at odds. Welfare gains from additional risk-sharing are reduced by overly incentivizing workers to choose risky occupations. In a calibration, optimal SDI increases welfare by 2.6% relative to actuarially fair ...
Working Paper
Human capital in the inner city
Black males in the United States are exposed to tremendous violence at young ages: In the NLSY97 26 percent report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43 percent by age 18. This paper studies how this exposure to violence and its associated social isolation affect education and labor market outcomes. I use Elijah Anderson?s ethnographic research on the ?code of the street? to guide the specification of a model of human capital accumulation that includes street capital, the skills and knowledge useful for providing personal security in neighborhoods where it is not provided by state ...
Report
Miss-Allocation: The Value of Workplace Gender Composition and Occupational Segregation
I analyze the value workers ascribe to the gender composition of their workplace and the consequences of these valuations for occupational segregation, tipping, and welfare. To elicit these valuations, I survey 9,000 U.S. adults using a hypothetical job choice experiment. This reveals that on average women and men value gender diversity, but these average preferences mask substantial heterogeneity. Older female workers are more likely to value gender homophily. This suggests that gender norms and discrimination, which have declined over time, may help explain some women’s desire for ...
Working Paper
Wage Determination in Social Occupations: The Role of Individual Social Capital
We make use of predicted social and civic activities (social capital) to account for selection into "social" occupations. Individual selection accounts for more than the total difference in wages observed between social and nonsocial occupations. The role that individual social capital plays in selecting into these occupations and the importance of selection in explaining wage differences across occupations is similar for both men and women. We make use of restricted data from the 2000 decennial census and the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Individual social capital is ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Juvenile Conviction on Human Capital and Labor Market Outcomes
This article documents the long-term relationship among juvenile conviction, occupation choices, employment, wages, and recidivism. Using data from NLSY97, we document that youths who are convicted at or before age 17 have lower full-time employment rate and lower wage growth rate even after 10 years into the labor market. Merging the NSLY97 with occupational characteristics data from O*NET, we show that youths with a juvenile conviction are less likely to be employed in occupations that have a higher on-the-job (OTJ) training requirement and these high OTJ occupations have higher wage and ...