Despite indications that people skills are important for understanding individual labor-market outcomes and have become more important over the last decades, there is little analysis by economists. This paper shows that people skills are important determinants of labor-market outcomes, including...

This paper examines how the public policy environment in the United States affects work by new mothers following childbirth. We examine four types of policies that vary across states and affect the budget constraint in different ways. The policy environment has important effects, particularly...

We conduct a randomized evaluation of two job-search support programs for urban youth in Ethiopia. One group of treated respondents receives a subsidy to cover the transport costs of job search. Another group participates in a job application workshop where their skills are certified and they...

This paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the Job Corps program, one of the largest federally-funded job training programs in the United States. Even with the aid of a randomized experiment, the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection, a...

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we demonstrate the usefulness of general equilibrium models as tools with which to draw policy implications for policies implemented in practice only as small-scale social experiments. Second, we illustrate the usefulness of social experiments...

This paper decomposes the participation process of a prototypical program into eligibility, awareness, application, acceptance and enrollment. With this decomposition, we determine the sources of unequal participation for different groups, and demonstrate that variables often have very different...

I review evidence on alternative labor market policies that could potentially improve economic self-sufficiency via mandating higher wages, subsidizing employment, or increasing productivity. The evidence indicates that the minimum wage is an ineffective policy to promote economic...

This paper tests whether school-to-work (STW) programs are particularly beneficial for those less likely to go to college in their absence%u2014%u2014often termed the %u201C%u201Cforgotten half%u201D%u201D in the STW literature. The empirical analysis is based on the NLSY97, which allows us to...

Affirmative Action is not only supposed to help move minorities and females into employment, it is also supposed to help move them up the job ladder, and it is this second goal that is perhaps the more controversial. Studies of Affirmative Action during thel ate 1960's and early 1910's found it...