Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

Our results indicate that two-thirds of active-duty military personnel report experiencing offensive racial behaviors in the previous 12 months, while approximately one in ten report threatening racial incidents or career-related discrimination. Racial harassment significantly increases job...

In a 1996 survey of U.S. military personnel, more than 65 percent experienced racially offensive behavior, and approximately one-in-ten reported threatening incidents or careerrelated racial discrimination. Perceived racial harassment is driven by social classifications that extend beyond racial...

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem; a strong military may not simply work as an...

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and...

This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses - including an investigation of the migratory response to...

In response to the Great Recession and sustained labor market downturn, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to historical highs in the United States. We exploit variation in the timing and size of UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall...

The unemployment rate in France is roughly 6 percentage points higher for African immigrants than for natives. In the US the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites. Commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work,...

Documenting trends in job stability over the past twenty-five years has become a controversial exercise. The two main sources of information on employer tenure, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), have generally given different pictures of the...