This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the growth in the service share in the United States. We model households that make decisions on home and market production of services that vary in their skill intensity at any point in time and vary in their optimal scale over time. We also allow for skill- and sector-biased technology progress. The benchmark model fully accounts for the rise in the service share, with the rising scale of services, rising demand for skill-intensive output, and skill-biased technical change all playing dominant roles. Furthermore, the model with multiperson households confirms that the essential findings of our benchmark model are robust to demographic considerations. It can explain two-thirds of the increase in female labor supply, which also plays a role in services growth.

This paper estimates the effects of educational attainment and school quality on crime among American women. Using changes in compulsory schooling laws as instruments and census data, we estimate significant effects of schooling attainment on the probability of incarceration. Using Uniform Crime Reports data, we estimate that increases in average state schooling levels reduce arrest rates for violent and property crime but not white collar crime. We find small and mixed direct effects of school quality on incarceration and arrests. We show that the effects of education on female crime are mostly related to changes in marital opportunities and family formation.

In many economic contexts, agents from the same population team up to better exploit their human capital. In such contexts (often called “roommate matching problems”), stable matchings may fail to exist even when utility is transferable. We show that when each individual has a close substitute, a stable matching can be implemented with minimal policy intervention. Our results shed light on the stability of partnerships in the labor market. Moreover, they imply that the tools crafted in empirical studies of the marriage problem can easily be adapted to many roommate problems.

The Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1985 aimed to reduce gender discrimination in the labor market, especially for career-oriented jobs. This paper investigates whether this act had an unanticipated effect on women’s marriage decisions. Using micro data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, we model women’s interrelated decisions on university education and whether to marry, focusing on whether women have married by age 32. Our results show a negative relationship between university education and marriage that is much greater for post-EEOA cohorts of women than for pre-EEOA cohorts, consistent with our hypothesis that the enhanced career opportunities associated with the EEOA stimulated women to delay or forgo marriage.

Medical R&D differs from other R&D because of a unique linkage between output and input markets: potential consumers of existing medical products are also potential subjects in clinical trials required to develop new products. Therefore, a quality increase or price reduction for an existing treatment reduces patients’ incentive to participate in trials of new treatments. We label this linkage the “subject supply effect” and provide evidence of it from trials of hepatitis C and AIDS treatments. The subject supply effect has important positive implications for how policies affect the rate of medical R&D and normative implications for whether subjects ought to be compensated for enrolling in clinical trials.

The aging of the scientific workforce and graying of grant recipients are central concerns in science policy. These trends are potentially important because older scientists are often seen as less open to new ideas than younger scientists. Here we put this hypothesis to an empirical test. A text analysis of 20 million biomedical research articles shows that papers published by younger researchers are more likely to build on new ideas. Collaboration with an experienced researcher also matters. Papers with a young first author and a more experienced last author are more likely to try out newer ideas than papers published by other team configurations. Our results buttress the case for funding young researchers but also provide a caution against unconditional idolatry of youth over experience.