Upjohn Research
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College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads
Get PDFWe use the near universe of U.S. online job ads to document four new facts about the skills employers demand from college majors. First, some skills––social and organizational––are demanded from all majors whereas others––financial and customer service––are demanded from only particular majors. Second, some majors have skill demand profiles that mirror overall demand for college graduates, such as Business and General Engineering, while other majors, such as Nursing and Education, have relatively rare skill profiles. Third, cross-major differences in skill profiles explain considerable wage variation. Fourth, although major-specific skill demand varies across place, this variation plays little role in explaining wage variation. College majors can thus be reasonably conceptualized as portable bundles of skills
Sometimes a Long and Winding Road: An Exploration of Kalamazoo Promise Stop Out and Reenrollment
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Jobseekers’ Beliefs about Comparative Advantage and (Mis)Directed Search
Get PDFWorker sorting into tasks and occupations has long been recognized as an important feature of labor markets. But this sorting may be inefficient if jobseekers have inaccurate beliefs about their skills and therefore apply to jobs that do not match their skills. To test this idea, we measure young South African jobseekers’ communication and numeracy skills and their beliefs about their skill levels. Many jobseekers believe they are better at the skill in which they score lower, relative to other jobseekers. These beliefs predict the skill requirements of jobs where they apply. In two field experiments, giving jobseekers their skill assessment results shifts their beliefs toward their assessment results. It also redirects their search toward jobs that value the skill in which they score relatively higher—using measures from administrative, incentivized task, and survey data—but does not increase total search effort. It also raises earnings and job quality, consistent with inefficient sorting due to limited information
The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence on Its Size and Composition and Ways to Improve Its Measurement in Household Surveys
Get PDFGood data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work. Based on these findings, we designed and fielded a large-scale telephone survey to elicit more accurate and complete information on independent contractors, including those who may be coded incorrectly as employees in conventional household survey data and those who are independent contractors in a secondary work activity. We find that, upon probing, roughly one in 10 workers who initially reports working for an employer on one or more jobs (and thus is coded as an employee) is in fact an independent contractor on at least one of those jobs. Incorporating these miscoded workers into estimates of work arrangement on the main job nearly doubles the share who are independent contractors, to about 15 percent of all workers. Young workers, less-educated workers, workers of color, multiple-job holders, and those with low hours are more likely to be miscoded. Taking these workers into account substantively changes the demographic profile of the independent contractor workforce. Our research indicates that probing in household surveys to clarify a worker’s employment arrangement and identify all low-hours work is critical for accurately measuring independent contractor work
Earned Income Subsidies, Female Labor Supply, and Child Outcomes
No full textThe goal of this project is to estimate the causal effects of earned income subsidies on women’s labor supply and their children’s human capital. To this end, we exploit a unique setting in Chile, where an earnings subsidy program—otherwise similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit in the United States—provides benefits only for woman below a target defined by a vulnerability score. Using administrative data on nearly two million potential beneficiaries, their labor market outcomes, and their children’s academic performance, we propose a Regression Discontinuity design to estimate causal effects of the program on women’s labor supply and on their children’s human capital. Our project seeks to provide new evidence about this important policy drawing from unique data and research design