Learning in labor markets--models of discrimination and school enrollment and empirical tests

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993.Includes bibliographical references.by Gerald S. Oettinger.Ph.D

Statistical Discrimination and the Early Career Evolution of the Black-White Wage Gap.

This article develops and tests a simple dynamic model of statistical discrimination. The model improves on earlier static models both by allowing ex ante uncertainty about worker productivity to be resolved as on-the-job performance is observed and by generating several testable empirical implications. These predictions are tested using a sample of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, producing mixed evidence for the model. The main empirical result is that no black-white wage gap exists at labor-force entry but that one develops as experience accumulates, mainly because blacks reap smaller gains from job mobility. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.

The Incidence and Wage Consequences of Home-Based Work in the United States, 1980–2000

This study documents the rapid growth in home-based wage and salary employment and the sharp decline in the home-based wage penalty in the United States between 1980 and 2000. These twin patterns, observed for both men and women in most occupation groups, suggest that employer costs of providing home-based work arrangements have decreased. Consistent with information technology (IT) advances being an important source of these falling costs, I find that occupation-gender cells that had larger increases in on-the-job IT use also experienced larger increases in the home-based employment share and larger declines in the home-based wage penalty.

The Effect Of Nonlinear Incentives On Performance: Evidence From "Econ 101"

This paper analyzes both theoretically and empirically how an absolute grading standard that allows only a small number of distinct grades affects student course performance outcomes. The clearest prediction of the model is that course performance of "grade-motivated" students will tend to be clustered slightly above the boundaries that separate grades, as long as the variance of the random component of performance is not too large. A more tenuous prediction is that the proximity of a grade-motivated student to a grade boundary going into the final exam should influence final exam performance, after controlling for prefinal exam performance. An empirical investigation of the course performance of university students who were enrolled in introductory economics classes that used an absolute grading standard finds evidence in favor of both of these predictions. The results suggest that student effort decisions respond to the incentives created by the grading system. © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology