This article describes the results of a survey of professional workers that was designed to explore the underlying reasons for the widely documented under representation of women in information technology jobs. Our analysis suggests that it is different occupational personalities between men and women rather than the demanding nature of IT work that is largely responsible for the relatively few...

Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper reports on a randomized experiment in Jordan in which female community college graduates were randomly ...

What Do Labor Market Institutions Do? The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is argued that research on UI is largely a success story, involvin...

We show that frictions in labor and capital markets can be a source of competitive advantage for a¢ liates of corporate groups over standalone …rms in environments where bene…ts from internal markets’‡exibility are high. We argue that the advantage of ‡exibility in changing labor inputs is related to how di¢ cult it is to change capital inputs. We predict that if substituting labor with capital...

The Affordable Care Act lets young adults stay on their parents’ insurance. Several recent papers use broad age-time difference-in-differences strategies to argue that this causes significant health insurance and labor effects. Using SIPP and CPS data, I show that difference-in-differences models over “placebo” dates also produce statistically significant “effects” long before ACA implementatio...

Does Retirement Kill You? Evidence from Early Retirement Windows The magnitude of the effect that health has on the retirement decision has long been studied. We examine the reverse relationship, whether or not retirement has a direct impact on laterlife health. In order to identify the causal relationship, we use unexpected early retirement window offers to instrument for retirement behavior. ...

Credible Research Designs for Minimum Wage Studies We assess alternative research designs for minimum wage studies. States in the U.S. with larger minimum wage increases differ from others in business cycle severity, increased inequality and polarization, political economy, and regional distribution. The resulting timevarying heterogeneity biases the canonical two-way fixed effects estimator. W...

Coming on top of long-term employment challenges, the COVID-19 crisis has severely impacted economies around world. Due to nature their labour markets, middle-income countries (MICs), including India, have experienced greater declines than advanced economies. Some sectors been hit harder others, while certain groups—including women, youth, migrants and those in informal economy—have felt brunt ...

This paper investigates the impact of instructional days on student performance. Because school year length is endogenously determined, I estimate the causal impact of school year length through two quasi-experiments that exploit different sources of variation in instructional days. The first identifies school year length’s effect through weather-related cancellations in Colorado and Maryland. ...