Journal of Labor Economics

There is concern that the risky behaviors of teenagers, such as truancy, negatively influence the behaviors of others through their social networks. We use administrative data to construct social networks based on students who are truant together. We simulate these networks to document that certain students systematically coordinate their absences. We validate them by showing that a parent information intervention on student absences has spillover effects from treated students onto their peers. Excluding these effects understates the intervention’s cost-effectiveness by 43%. We show that there is potential to use networks to target interventions more efficiently given a budget constraint.

We construct the first long-term comparison of cross-sectional and panel estimates of immigrant earnings assimilation in the United States from a single data source. Unlike previous results, we find that selective out-migration of higher-earning immigrants biases downward cross-sectional estimates for all education groups. Cross-sectional estimates dramatically understate earnings growth for high-skilled foreign-born workers. The bias stems from both selective out-migration and selective employment; among high-skilled immigrants, low earners find employment with a substantial delay, while high earners work immediately on arrival. We present suggestive evidence that the H-1B visa program may play a role in estimated immigrant earnings dynamics.

This paper uses administrative employment and conviction data to evaluate laws that restrict access to job seekers’ criminal records. Convictions generate decreases in employment and earnings, partly due to shifts toward lower-paying industries less likely to check criminal histories. However, a 2013 Seattle law barring employers from examining job seekers’ records until after an initial screening had negligible impacts on ex-offenders’ labor market outcomes. The results are consistent with employers deferring background checks until later in the interview process or ex-offenders applying only to jobs where clean records are not required, a pattern supported by survey evidence.

The composition of immigrants depends not only on immigrant choice but also on immigration policy, because slots are rationed. Policy determines immigrant attainment, as evidenced by immigrants from Algeria having higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Theory predicts and evidence confirms that immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to population and education levels at home. A parsimonious specification has only two variables yet explains a majority of the variation in educational attainment of US immigrant groups. The theory and predictions are bolstered by Swedish data.

We document that individuals who grow up in high firm density areas are more likely to become entrepreneurs, given firm density in their current location, and to run businesses in the sector with the highest density when young. Firm density at an entrepreneur’s young age drives current firm profitability and is more important than current density for business performance. Results hold in a sample of movers, which allows addressing endogeneity concerns. These results are consistent with entrepreneurial skills being partly learnable through social contacts. Accordingly, entrepreneurs who grow up in high firm density areas adopt better managerial practices.

We report the results of a field experiment in which treated employers could not observe the compensation history of their job applicants. Treated employers responded by evaluating more applicants and evaluating those applicants more intensively. They also responded by changing what kind of workers they evaluated: treated employers evaluated workers with 5% lower past average wages and hired workers with 13% lower past average wages. Conditional on bargaining, workers hired by treated employers struck better wage bargains for themselves.

Choosing where to apply to college is a complex problem with long-term consequences, but many students lack the guidance necessary to make optimal choices. I show that a technology that provides low-cost personalized college admissions information to more than 40% of high schoolers significantly alters college choices. Students shift applications and attendance to colleges for which they can observe information on schoolmates’ admissions experiences. Responses are largest when such information suggests a high admissions probability. Disadvantaged students respond the most, and information on in-state colleges increases their 4-year college attendance. Data features and framing, however, deter students from selective colleges.

We study the impact of trade exposure on the job biographies of 2.4 million manufacturing workers in Germany. Rising export opportunities lead to two equally important sources of earnings gains: on the job and employer switches within the same industry. Highly skilled workers benefit the most. Import shocks mostly hurt low-skilled workers, especially when they possess lots of industry-specific human capital. They also destroy workers’ rents when separating from high-wage plants, and they leave strongly scarring effects in the event of a mass layoff. We connect our results to the growing theoretical literature on the labor market effects of trade.