Past Conferences and Seminars

Bocconi University

"The effects of working while in school: Evidence from Uruguayan lotteries."

Shall we encourage students to work while in school? We provide evidence by leveraging a one-year work-study program that randomizes job offers among students in Uruguay. Using social security data matched to over 120,000 applicants, we estimate an increase of 9% in earnings and of 2 percentage points in enrollment over the four post-program years for treated youth. Survey data indicate that enrolled participants reduce study time, but this does not translate into lower grades. Students mainly substitute leisure and household chores with work. A decomposition exercise suggests that work experience is the main mechanism behind the increase in earnings.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Skill Prices, Occupations, and Changes in the Wage Structure for Low Skilled Men."

This paper studies the effect of the change in occupational structure on wages for low skilled men. We develop a model of occupational choice in which workers have multi-dimensional skills that are exploited differently across different occupations. We allow for a rich specification of technological change which has heterogenous effects on different occupations and different parts of the skill distribution. We estimate the model combining four datasets: (1) O*NET, to measure skill intensity across occupations, (2) NLSY79, to identify life-cycle supply effects, (3) CPS (ORG), to estimate the evolution of skill prices and occupations over time, and (4) NLSY97 to see how the gain to specific skills has changed. We find that while changes in the occupational structure have affected wages of low skilled workers, the effect is not dramatic. First, the wages in traditional blue collar occupations have not fallen substantially relative to other occupations-a fact that we can not reconcile with a competitive model. Second, our decompositions show that changes in occupations explain only a small part of the patterns in wage levels over our time period. Price changes within occupation are far more important. Third, while we see an increase in the payoff to interpersonal skills, manual skills still remain the most important skill type for low educated males.

University of Geneva

"Farmers to Entrepreneurs."

Harvard University

"School Vouchers, Labor Markets and Vocational Education."

We provide evidence on the long-run impact of vouchers for private secondary schools, evidence collected twenty years after students applied for the vouchers. Prior to the voucher lottery, students applied to either an academic or vocational secondary school, an important mediating factor in the vouchers’ impacts. We find strong tertiary education and labor market effects for those students who applied to vocational schools with almost no impact on those who applied to academic schools. The labor market gains for vocational students are strongest at the top of the distribution and null at the bottom of the distribution. We find additional long-run impacts on consumption and teen-age fertility. The expected net present value of benefits to participants and to taxpayers was large and positive implying that the program was welfare improving unless net externalities were large and negative.