Background: One way of evaluating immigrants' labor market outcomes is to assess the extent to which immigrants are able to enter into jobs that are commensurate with their education and experience. An imperfect alignment between workers' educational qualifications and these required for their current job, or education-job mismatch, has…

There is a growing body of research examining the labor market returns to college major, motivated by the large returns to skill in the labor market. Prior research has focused almost exclusively on mean effects and has paid little attention to the role of earnings growth and variability. Using linked administrative data from Texas on public K-12…

Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all.…

We examine the labor supply decisions of substitute teachers -- a large, on-demand market with broad shortages and inequitable supply. In 2018, Chicago Public Schools implemented a targeted bonus program designed to reduce unfilled teacher absences in largely segregated Black schools with historically low substitute coverage rates. Using a…

This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents' earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents' labor market outcomes as well as…

T his paper presents an assessment of suggestions in international research and media that the modern construction cadetship experience is exploitative and, on that basis, problematises the growing trend of work integrated learning (WIL) in the Australian construction industry. Field research, aligning with the methodologies of major studies in…

The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a suite of such programs targeted to underrepresented high…

The three chapters of this dissertation use tools of applied microeconomics to study topics related to education and regulation. The first chapter, "Where Doctors Work," studies how openings and closures of medical schools in the United States have affected the geographical distribution of doctors. The principal contribution is the…

Based on interviews with sixty- one working- class men in rural Pennsylvania, this article explores the ways in which rural, working- class men do--and do not--seek to improve their labor- market positions by getting additional education or training, moving, or taking gender- atypical jobs. The evidence presented shows that men are making many…

Despite the contributions of their work to the learning and development of young children, child care and early education (CCEE) educators are among the lowest paid workers in the United States and have high rates of turnover in their jobs. In a pioneering effort, Washington, DC has launched the nation's first large-scale, publicly funded program…

The Work Volition Scale (WVS) is a brief measure of the perceived capacity to make career decisions despite constraints; however, systematic validation of item responses to the scale is still in its infancy. The present article reports on research conducted to investigate the latent structure of WVS, its invariance across gender, and mean…

Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite strong evidence that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, some critics of higher education increasingly argue that college "does not pay off" and that some students--namely, disadvantaged prospective…

Over half a century after pay discrimination became illegal in the United States, a persistent pay gap between men and women continues to hurt our nation's workers and our national economy. Women working full time in the U.S. are paid 82 cents to every dollar earned by men -- but it doesn't stop there. The consequences?of this gap?affect?women…

Female faculty earn 81.4% of what male faculty earn. Salary negotiation is a critical component of job offers and can have lasting implications for pay during a career. To better understand the salary negotiation process for female sport management professors, this study examined perceived barriers held by participants. A qualitative approach was…

Participation in Career Technical Education (CTE) programs has been proposed as a valuable strategy for supporting transition to independence among students with disabilities. We exploit a discontinuity created by admissions thresholds from a statewide system of CTE high schools. Our findings suggest attending CTE high schools has large positive…