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Working Paper
Occupational Choice, Retirement, and the Effects of Disability Insurance
There is much variation in the physical requirements across occupations, giving rise to great differences in later-life productivity, disability risk, and the value of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In this paper, I look at how such differences across occupations affect initial career choice as well as the extent to which SSDI, which insures shocks to productivity due to disability, prompts more people to choose physically intense occupations. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), I estimate a dynamic model of occupational ...
Working Paper
Human capital in the inner city
Black males in the United States are exposed to tremendous violence at young ages: In the NLSY97 26 percent report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43 percent by age 18. This paper studies how this exposure to violence and its associated social isolation affect education and labor market outcomes. I use Elijah Anderson?s ethnographic research on the ?code of the street? to guide the specification of a model of human capital accumulation that includes street capital, the skills and knowledge useful for providing personal security in neighborhoods where it is not provided by state ...
Working Paper
Occupational Switching During the Second Industrial Revolution
During the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of automation technologies coincided with substantial job creation but also a “hollowing out” of middle-skilled job opportunities, which historically offered reliable paths to prosperity. We use recently linked U.S. census data to document three main facts: (i) declining demand for middle-skilled labor in manufacturing corresponded to greater reallocation of workers into comparatively less-skilled occupations; (ii) older workers were more likely to switch to unskilled physical labor; (iii) younger ...