Research

Working Paper(s)

The Long-Run Effects of Parental Wealth Shocks on Children (with Adrian Haws, Ian Fillmore, and Joseph Price) [pdf from aeaweb.org]

What are the causal effects of parental wealth on children’s outcomes? Beginning with the famous land run of 1889, initial homesteaders in Oklahoma Territory raced to claim plots of land unaware that oil lay hidden beneath their feet. We link initial homesteaders to the locations of oil discoveries and develop new methods to link them to their children in the 1940 census, which allows us to examine the impacts of parental wealth shocks on children’s wealth, income, labor supply, education, and migration.

Work(s) in progress

Specialization, Skill Mismatch, and Labor Market Risk (with Fernando Lopes)

In this paper, we build a model of the labor market with search frictions in which workers choose how much to invest in a multidimensional set of skills before entering the labor force. We show that search frictions have important consequences for skill allocation, distorting skill choices and affecting the quality of matches in the labor market. Workers become less specialized as a way to insure against labor market risk, reducing the match value between workers and firms. This induces a novel type of cost of search frictions, which we call skill distortion. We propose a method to separately identify the output cost of skill distortion in our model. We show it is quantitatively relevant and that search frictions account for around one third of total mismatch when compared to preference heterogeneity. We also show that pre-labor market skill accumulation can have important consequences for the design of unemployment insurance policy by endogenously reducing mismatch in response to more generous insurance benefits.

Publications

Reconciling Occupational Mobility in the Current Population Survey (with Christian vom Lehn and Zachary Kroff) [journal version]
Journal of Labor Economics, 2020

Measuring occupational mobility from the Current Population Survey using retrospective or longitudinal methods generates substantially different outcomes, in both levels and trends. Using a generalized method of moments technique, we estimate the level of occupational mobility and the measurement error in both of these measures for 1981–2018. We estimate that occupational mobility has been trending down, particularly since 2000, consistent with retrospective measures of occupational mobility. However, estimated mobility is 2–3 percentage points or 60%–70% higher than retrospective measures. Measurement error in longitudinal measures is large and has been worsening over time.