This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

We study the granular wage and employment effects of a German place-based policy using a research design that leverages conditionally exogenous EU-wide rules governing program parameters at the regional level. The place-based program subsidizes investments to create jobs with a subsidy rate that...

The dispersion of individual returns to experience, often referred to as heterogeneity of income profiles (HIP), is a key parameter in empirical human capital models, in studies of life‐cycle income inequality, and in heterogeneous agent models of life‐cycle labor market dynamics. It is...

The dispersion of individual returns to experience, often referred to as heterogeneity of income profiles (HIP), is a key parameter in empirical human capital models, in studies of life-cycle income inequality, and in heterogeneous agent models of life-cycle labor market dynamics. It is commonly...

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed...

This dissertation is comprised of three papers. In Chapter 1 I analyze if career heterogeneity in terms of life-cycle earnings, occupational mobility and unemployment is predominantly driven by skills acquired prior to labor market entry or by decisions made and shocks accumulated over the...