Workers' Compensation (WC) is a large social insurance program that provides medical care and cash benefits to workers injured on the job. Each WC claim involves several different parties--the injured worker, employer, doctor, insurer, and, if applicable, a third-party case manager. To date, the...

Human capital theory states that workers' knowledge and skills increase their productivity and thus raise their earnings. An important dimension of human capital theory distinguishes between general human capital and specific human capital. Chapter Two and Chapter Three of this dissertation...

My dissertation is composed of two essays in Labor Economics. The first chapter examines how employers learn about workers' unobserved productivity when learning is asymmetric between incumbent and outside firms. I develop an asymmetric employer learning model in which endogenous job mobility is...

Chapter 1: The Anticipatory Effects of Medicare Part D on Drug Utilization This paper quantifies the anticipatory effects of the passage of Medicare Part D on prescription drug utilization. Part D expanded Medicare to include insurance coverage for prescription drugs for the first time. While...

The past century has seen a tremendous rise in female labor force participation.My dissertation addresses aspects of how the American family has shaped andhas been shaped by rising levels of female labor supply. The first chapter provides anintroduction and discussion. The second chapter...

One competitive-market explanation of interindustry wage differentials that is not challenged by the persistence of these differentials is that they are due to differences across workers in unobserved ability or quality. In contrast, this paper explores the unobserved ability hypothesis by using...