How does being over- or underqualified at the beginning of a worker's career affect skill acquisition, retention, and promotion? Despite the importance of mismatch for the labor market, self-selection into jobs has made estimating these effects difficult. We overcome endogeneity concerns in the...

We estimate the effects of being over- or underqualified for a job using quasi-random assignment of new enlistees to over 130 different jobs in the US Air Force. Being overqualified causes higher attrition, both during technical training and afterward when individuals are working in their...

We evaluate the influence on the skill premium of the task content of jobs by exploiting the text data from online job ads covering 2009-2018 (over 189,000 ads) published by one of the leading Chilean online job portals (www.trabajando.com). Our analysis tests the expected complementarity...

Using rich data on personnel records, work assignments, and performance in a financial institu- tion, we uncover the mechanisms leading to promotion gaps in knowledge teamwork. We find a substantial promotion gap for women in early career stages. Analyzing over 10,000 investment projects reveals...

Place shapes the educational attainment of children, yet the underlying reasons remain poorly understood. In this paper, I investigate the role of spatial differences in educational signals received by students. Using Dutch administrative data combined with high-stakes national exam scores, I...

We conduct a large-scale experiment in the labor market using more than 8,000 fictitious resumes to uncover the demand-side mechanisms behind the wage penalty for the self- employed. We find that self-employed individuals, compared to wage earners, are subject to adverse treatment across...