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...

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...

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...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of theaverage effect of the treatment under assumptions of unconfoundedness or ignorability following the seminal work by Rubin (1974) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). In many cases however, researchers are...

Properties of GMM estimators are sensitive to the choice of instruments. Usingmany instruments leads to high asymptotic asymptotic efficiency but can causehigh bias and/or variance in small samples. In this paper we develop and implementasymptotic mean square error (MSE) based criteria for...

The otherwise straightforward analysis of randomized experiments is often complicated by the presence of missing data. In such situations it is necessary to make assumptions about the dependence of the selection mechanism on treatment, response, and covariates. The widely used approach of...