Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental...

We develop estimation methods that use the amount of selection on the observables in a model as a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables. We show that if the observed variables are a random subset of a large number of factors that influence the endogenous variable and the outcome...

We develop a framework that may be used to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. This framework results in a simple formula showing that the "cream-skimming" effect is increasing in the degree of...

In this paper, we investigate the responsiveness of the demand for college to changes in student aid arising from a Danish reform. We separately identify the effect of aid from that of other observed and unobserved variables such as parental income. We exploit the combination of a kinked aid...

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics that affect the outcome. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially...

We analyze the early labor market outcomes of U.S. college graduates from the classes of 1974 to 2011, as a function of the economic conditions into which they graduated. We have three main findings. First, poor labor market conditions substantially disrupt early careers. A large recession at...

Motivated by the large differences in labor market outcomes across college majors, we survey the literature on the demand for and return to high school and post-secondary education by field of study. We combine elements from several papers to provide a dynamic model of education and occupation...

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Health and Retirement Study, we provide a set of facts about vacation leave and its relationship to hours worked, hours constraints, wage rates, worker characteristics, spouse's vacation leave, labor market experience, job tenure, occupation,...

This paper studies the returns to seniority, the returns to experience, and the effects of seniority and experience at the time of a quit or layoff on changes in the job match specific component of wages. We show that these returns are not identified in widely used regression models that relate...

This paper examines the effects of immigration on the labor market outcomes of less-skilled natives. Working from a simple model of a local labor market, we show that the effects of immigration can be estimated from the correlations between the fraction of immigrants in a city and the employment...