Economists have traditionally assumed that people's productivity in the labor market is determined solely by the choices they make over the course of their lifetime and have paid relatively little attention to the possibility that productivity might be influenced by the attributes and decisions...

In this paper we focus on education as a private decision to invest in ‘human capital’ and the estimation of the rate of return to that private investment. While the literature is replete with studies that estimate the rate of return using regression methods where the estimated return is...

The role of skilled labor in the modern economy and its importance in explaining trends in wage inequality and productivity has been a focus of a broad strand of research in economics. Labor is an input into production that is very different from capital or materials. One key difference is that...

This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay I show that there are substantial differences in unemployment durations and reemployment outcomes for workers coming from different occupations. I argue that this variation can be explained by differences in occupational employment...

The correlation between wage premia and concentrations of firm activity may arise due to agglomeration economies or workers sorting by unobserved productivity. A worker's residential location is used as a proxy for their unobservable productivity attributes in order to test whether estimated...

This dissertation examines skilled immigration in the context of labor and health economics. The research focuses on the high-skilled labor market, whereas previous studies either treat all immigrants as a homogeneous group or focus on the low-skilled. The first essay investigates the wage...