This paper uses panel and retrospective life history data from an important new data source the British Household Panel Survey to establish some stylised facts about the unemployment experiences of men. In particular we investigate the proportion of the sample who suffer from repeated unemployment spells, the origin and destination states of unemployment spells, some reasons for entering unempl...

Drawing on the author’s work, this lecture presents evidence on U.S. income and wealth inequality. It presents series for top income and wealth shares, and the distribution of economic growth by income groups. It discusses the mechanisms behind the evolution of U.S. income and wealth inequality from historical and comparative perspectives. It analyzes the role of public policy and in particular...

We study labor market returns to vocational versus general secondary education using a regression discontinuity design created by the centralized admissions process in Finland. Admission track increases initial annual income, and this benefit persists at least through mid-thirties, present discount value calculations suggest that it is unlikely life cycle will turn negative retirement. Moreover...

This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of 1918 influenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen renewed interest because COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview key contextual epidemiological details as well data are available to researchers. then examine effects mortality, fertility, economy in short medium run. The role non-pharmaceutical inte...

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor its wage. We find most plants operate monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown 1.53, implying worker earning only 65 cents on the dollar generated. To investigate lo...

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When effects are heterogeneous, common justification including IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given causal interpretation as positively weighted average of local (LATEs). This requires well-known monotonicity condition. However, we show with more than one ...

This paper combines a search model and signaling game to analyze the interrelationship between labor market outcome and educational choices as well as relevant policy implications, featuring endogenous educational requirement for job application. It explains more than 60% of the unemployment rate difference between college and high school graduates. It predicts that higher unemployment benefit ...

Less than a handful of papers have used data on individuals to examine people’s decisions about which school to attend. This paper develops a nested logit model of the determinants of choice of a graduate business school. Data are drawn from a new longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test. One finding is that elasticity of school choice with respect to tuitio...

How much do a manager’s interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills? Using personnel data from a large, high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong negative relation to employee turnover. A causal interpretation is reinforced by research designs expl...