Changes Across Cohorts in Wage Returns to Schooling and Early Work Experiences

Abstract

We thank Christian Belzil, Michael Boehm, Flavio Cunha, Lance Lochner, Matt Masten and participants at various seminars and conferences for useful comments and discussions at various stages of this research. We especially wish to thank Vladislav Slanchev for providing us with a version of his statistical software for estimating dynamic discrete choice models with a latent factor error structure that we used in our structural analysis and for his generous assistance in adapting it to our context. Any remaining errors are ours. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The price of polarization: Estimating task prices under routine‐biased technical change

“…I focus on 27‐year‐old males in 1984–1992 and 2007–2009 in the NLSY 1979 and 1997, respectively. The comparison at constant age arguably reduces the concerns about age effects in earnings (Ashworth et al (), further show comparable early work experience in the two NLSYs). The details of the sample construction can be found in Section F of the Appendix…”

“… For example, Ashworth, Hotz, Maurel, and Ransom () documented that early labor market experience in the NLSY97 is overall similar to the NLSY79 but the composition did shift from out‐of‐school to in‐school work experience, which may to some extent have changed the task‐specific experiences as well. Another advantage of using young workers, according to Gottschalk, Green, and Sand (), is that their wages may better capture recent task price movements compared to older workers, whose wages are more sticky (e.g., because of implicit contracting). …”

Does Student Work Really Affect Educational Outcomes? A Review of the Literature

“…As these non‐academic skills and achievements are increasingly important in college admissions and employers’ hiring decisions (Bruggink and Gambhir, ; Rosenbaum, ; Ashworth et al. , ; Baert and Vujić, ), combining study and work may substantially contribute to the accumulation of human capital necessary for post‐secondary education success i . Second, combining study and work may offer students the opportunity to apply in practice what they have learned in school (Hotz et al.…”

The evolution of the US family income–schooling relationship and educational selectivity

“…To construct our model, we build on the literature on reduced-form models of schooling such as Cameron and Heckman (2001) and Ashworth, Hotz, Maurel, and Ransom (2020), and in which intertemporal utilities are represented by linear (in the parameters) functions and in which unobserved heterogeneity plays a key role. Our model uses a reduced-form representation of the grade attainment process but also allows for potential discontinuities.…”