This paper examines the relationship between individuals' personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital. Focusing on bachelor's degree recipients, we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling...

We find robust evidence that cohorts of male graduates who start college during worse economic times earn higher average wages than those who start during better times. This gap is not explained by differences in selection into employment, in economic conditions at the time of college...

Using data for nearly 40 cohorts of American college graduates and exploiting regional variation in economic conditions, we show robust evidence of a positive relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of college enrollment and subsequent annual earnings, particularly for women. This...

The debate about the impact of routine-biased technical change on wages revolves around the question whether occupational or overall wage distributions polarized. This paper instead argues that routine task prices should decline compared to abstract and manual task prices. I propose a new...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace tasks between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization - that is, rising employment in the...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization – that is, rising employment in the...

Entry rates into self-employment increase during recessions and decrease during economic upswings. I show that this is mostly explained by the higher unemployment rate during a recession, together with the fact that at all times, unemployed persons have a relatively high propensity to become...

A common finding in the entrepreneurship literature is that business creation increases in recessions. This counter-cyclical pattern is examined by separating business creation into two components: "opportunity" and "necessity" entrepreneurship. Although there is general agreement in the...

We examine the determinants of involuntary part-time employment, focusing on variation associated with the business cycle and variation attributable to more persistent structural features of the labor market. Our theoretical framework distinguishes between workers' decision to seek part-time...

When students themselves enjoy large degrees of freedom in determining the duration of their studies, it results in a fairly large degree of interindividual variance in terms of time-todegree. This paper investigates individual time-to-degree in a model where students determine the optimum...