Two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience, and innovations in wage residuals have a large, unpredictable component. The leading explanations for these patterns are that over time, either firms learn about worker...

This paper studies the role of employer behavior in generating "negative duration dependence" -- the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell -- by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an...

The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking has declined more for the better educated,...

This paper studies the role of employer behavior in generating “negative duration dependence” - the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell - by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an...

Three fundamental forces have shaped labor markets over the last 50 years: the secular increase in the returns to education, educational upgrading, and the integration of large numbers of women into the workforce. We modify the Katz and Murphy (1992) framework to predict the structure of the...

We explore the extent to which composition, duration dependence, and labor force non-participation can account for the sharp increase in the incidence of long-term unemployment (LTU) during the Great Recession. We first show that compositional shifts in demographics, occupation, industry,...

The empirical literature on employer learning assumes that employers learn about unobserved ability differences across workers as they spend time in the labor market. This article describes testable implications that arise from this basic hypothesis and how they have been used to quantify the...

We use the 2006 Qu'ebec paternity leave reform to replicate Dahl et al., 2014 who estimate the peer effects of paternity leave taking among male co-workers. The Qu'ebec reform of the paternity leave system closely resembles the Norwegian 1993 reform they analyze. Using high-quality...

Labor Force States and flows between are useful tools to model individual dynamics in the labor market. This chapter reviews recent literature uncovering substantial heterogeneity in transitions across Labor Force States. We review methods and results by replicating leading studies using...