Most Popular Books by Alan B. Krueger

We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C & B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C & B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data. We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents'' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.

This paper re-examines the effect of the 1992 New Jersey minimum wage increase on employment in the fast-food industry. We begin by analyzing employment trends using a comprehensive new data set derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics''s (BLS''s) ES-202 data file. Both a longitudinal sample and a repeated-cross-section sample drawn from these data indicate similar or slightly faster employment growth in New Jersey relative to eastern Pennsylvania after the rise in New Jersey''s minimum wage, consistent with the main findings of our earlier survey. We also use the ES-202 data to measure the effects of the 1996 increase in the federal minimum wage, which raised the minimum wage in Pennsylvania but not in New Jersey. We find no indication of relative employment losses in Pennsylvania. In light of these findings, we re-examine employment trends in the sample of fast-food restaurants assembled by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) and David Neumark and William Wascher. The differences between this sample and both the BLS data and our earlier sample are attributable to a small set of restaurants owned by a single franchisee who provided the original Pennsylvania data for the 1995 EPI study. We also find that employment trends in the EPI/Neumark-Wascher sample are strikingly different for firms that reported their data on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis, possibly because of seasonal factors. Controlling for the systematic effects of the varying reporting intervals, the combined EPI/Neumark-Wascher sample shows no difference in hours growth between New Jersey and Pennsylvania

This paper has three goals; first, to place U.S. job growth in international perspective by exploring cross-country differences in employment and population growth. This section finds that the U.S. has managed to absorb added workers -- especially female workers -- into employment at a greater rate than most countries. The leading explanation for this phenomenon is that the U.S. labor market has flexible wages and employment practices, whereas European labor markets are rigid. The second goal of the paper is to evaluate the labor market rigidities hypothesis. Although greater wage flexibility probably contributes to the U.S.''s comparative success in creating jobs for its population, the slow growth in employment in many European countries appears too uniform across skill groups to result from relative wage inflexibility alone. Furthermore, a great deal of labor market adjustment seems to take place at a constant real wage in the U.S. This leads to the third goal: to speculate on other explanations why the U.S. has managed to successfully absorb so many new entrants to the labor market. We conjecture that product market constraints contribute to the slow growth of employment in many countries

This paper examines the properties and prevalence of measurement error in longitudinal earnings data. The analysis compares Current Population Survey data to administrative Social Security payroll tax records for a sample of heads of households over two years. In contrast. to the typically assumed properties of measurement error, the results indicate that errors are serially correlated over two years and negatively correlated with true earnings (i.e., mean reverting). Moreover, reported earnings are more reliable for females than males. Overall, the ratio of the variance of the signal to the total variance is .82 for men and .92 for women. These ratios fall to .65 and .81 when the data are specified in first-differences. The estimates suggest that longitudinal earnings data may be more reliable than previously believed.

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government oversight contribute to wage gains and variability. Estimates from the survey indicated that 35 percent of employees were either licensed or certified by the government, and that 29 percent were fully licensed. Another 3 percent stated that all who worked in their job would eventually be required to be certified or licensed, bringing the total that are or eventually must be licensed or certified by government to 38 percent. We find that licensing is associated with about 14 percent higher wages, but the effect of governmental certification on pay is much smaller. Licensing by multiple political jurisdictions is associated with the highest wage gains relative to only local licensing. Specific requirements by the government for a worker to enter an occupation, such as education level and long internships, are positively associated with wages. We find little association between licensing and the variance of wages, in contrast to unions. Overall, our results show that occupational licensing is an important labor market phenomenon that can be measured in labor force surveys.

Between 1970 and 1973 priority for military service was randomly assigned to draft-age men in a series of lotteries. Many men who were at risk of being drafted managed to avoid military service by enrolling in school and obtaining an educational deferment This paper uses the draft lottery as a natural experiment to estimate the return to education and the veteran premium. Estimates are based on special extracts of the Current Population Survey for 1979and 1981-85. The results suggest that an extra year of schooling acquired in response to the lottery is associated with6.6 percent higher weekly earnings. This figure is about 10 percent higher than the OLS estimate of the return to education in this sample, which suggests there is omitted-variable bias in conventional estimates of the return to education. Our findings are robust to a variety of assumptions about the effect of veteran status on earnings.

Abstract: parental income or education affects state-level rates of return.

The method of instrumental variables was first used in the 1920s to estimate supply and demand elasticities, and later used to correct for measurement error in single-equation models. Recently, instrumental variables have been widely used to reduce bias from omitted variables in estimates of causal relationships such as the effect of schooling on earnings. Intuitively, instrumental variables methods use only a portion of the variability in key variables to estimate the relationships of interest; if the instruments are valid, that portion is unrelated to the omitted variables. We discuss the mechanics of instrumental variables, and the qualities that make for a good instrument, devoting particular attention to instruments that are derived from ''natural experiments.'' A key feature of the natural experiments approach is the transparency and refutability of identifying assumptions. We also discuss the use of instrumental variables in randomized experiments.

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of social insurance programs. We argue that this topic deserves separate treatment from the rest of the labor supply literature because individuals may be imperfectly informed as to the rules of the programs and because key parameters are likely to differ for those who are eligible for social insurance programs, such as the disabled. Furthermore, differences in social insurance programs often provide natural experiments with exogenous changes in wages or incomes that can be used to estimate labor supply responses. Finally, social insurance often affects different margins of labor supply. For example, the labor supply literature deals mostly with adjustments in the number of hours worked, whereas the incentives of social insurance programs frequently affect the decision of whether to work at all. The empirical work on unemployment insurance (UI) and workers'' compensation (WC) insurance finds that the programs tend to increase the length of time employees spend out of work. Most of the estimates of the elasticities of lost work time that incorporate both the incidence and duration of claims are close to 1.0 for unemployment insurance and between 0.5 and 1.0 for workers'' compensation. These elasticities are substantially larger than the labor supply elasticities typically found for men in studies of the effects of wages or taxes on hours of work. The evidence on disability insurance and (especially) social security retirement suggests much smaller and less conclusively established labor supply effects. Part of the explanation for this difference probably lies in the fact that UI and WC lead to short-run variation in wages with mostly a substitution effect. Our review suggest that it would be misleading to apply a universal set of labor supply elasticities to these diverse problems and populations

This paper tests a central implication of the theory of equalizing differences, that workers sort into jobs with different attributes based on their preferences for those attributes. We present evidence from four new time-use data sets for the United States and France on whether workers who are more gregarious, as revealed by their behavior when they are not working, tend to be employed in jobs that involve more social interactions. In each data set we find a significant and sizable relationship between the tendency to interact with others off the job and while working. People''s descriptions of their jobs and their personalities also accord reasonably well with their time use on and off the job. Furthermore, workers in occupations that require social interactions according to the O''Net Dictionary of Occupational Titles tend to spend more of their non-working time with friends. Lastly, we find that workers report substantially higher levels of job satisfaction and net affect while at work if their jobs entail frequent interactions with coworkers and other desirable working conditions.

Most existing work on the price elasticity of demand for health insurance focuses on employees'' decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In the summer of 2008, we conducted a survey experiment to assess the willingness to pay for a health plan among a large sample of uninsured Americans. The experiment yields price elasticities substantially greater than those found in most previous studies. We use these results to estimate coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, with and without an individual mandate. We estimate that 39 million uninsured individuals would gain coverage and find limited evidence of adverse selection.

Abstract: timing and generosity of compensation.

Abstract: different industries. The major finding is that there is substantial.

Using data from a longitudinal survey of fast food restaurants in Texas, the authors examine the impact of recent changes in the federal minimum wage on a low-wage labor market The authors draw four main conclusions. First, the survey results indicate that less than 5 percent of fast food restaurants use the new youth subminimum wage even though the vast majority paid a starting wage below the new hourly minimum wage immediately before the new minimum went into effect. Second, although some restaurants increased wages by an amount exceeding that necessary to comply with higher minimum wages in both 1990 and 1991, recent increases in the federal minimum wage have greatly compressed the distribution of starting wages in the Texas fast food industry. Third, employment increased relatively in those firms likely to have been most affected by the 1991 minimum wage increase. Fourth, changes in the prices of meals appear to be unrelated to mandated wage changes. These employment and price changes do not seem consistent with conventional views of the effects of increases in a binding minimum wage.

This paper examines the determinants of the number and quality of outside applicants for federal job openings using a variety of time-series, cross-sectional and panel data sets. The main finding is that the application rate for government jobs increases as the ratio of federal to private sector earnings Increases, but does not appear to be related to the relative level of fringe benefits. Furthermore, an Increase in the federal-private sector earnings differential is associated with an increase in the average quality of applicants for federal jobs. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for wage determination and recruitment in the federal government.