Technological Impacts on Return to Education in Brazil
by Yirui Zhao Abstract The wage return to education has been studied for a long time. Acemoglu and Autor (2010) connect the decrease of medium-level job opportunities in the U.S. with technological advances. Their theoretical model predicts that if technology replaces routine jobs, workers with medium-level skills will experience decreases in wages relative to both […]
An Analysis of the Labor Market Returns to Community College and Vocational Training
by Eli Levine Abstract Education and training are fundamentally linked with labor market performance. There is a significant body of work analyzing the role of education in wages with an emphasis on a comparison between a college degree and a high school diploma. However, as states have begun to shift their education policies to make […]
Labor Market Effects of the Minimum Wage in South Korea
by Alec Ashforth Abstract This paper analyzes survey data from businesses regarding individual worker earnings, hours, and characteristics from 1971 to 1998 in order to estimate the labor market effects of the minimum wage in South Korea. Since the minimum wage was only implemented in manufacturing, construction, and mining industries, we are able to compare […]
For Love of the Game: A Study of Tournament Theory and Intrinsic Motivation in Dota 2
By YAO Shengjie This paper studies the effect of intrinsic motivation on the extrinsic incentives specified by tournament structure in tournament theory in the context of e-sports. It incorporates tournament theory and motivation crowding theory in the same framework, something that past literature have hinted towards but never formally done so. It also uses an […]
Immigrant Workers in a Changing Labor Environment: A study on how technology is reshaping immigrant earnings
By Grace Peterson This research determines how automation affects immigrant wages in the US and how closely this impact follows the skills-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis. The present study addresses this question using American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2012 to 2016 and a job automation probability index to explain technological change. This research leverages […]
Incentives to Quit in Men’s Professional Tennis: An Empirical Test of Tournament Theory
By Will Walker This paper studies the influence of incentives on quitting behaviors in professional men’s tennis tournaments and offers broader implications to pay structures in the labor market. Precedent literature established that prize incentives and skill heterogeneity can impact player effort exertion. Prize incentives include prize money and indirect financial rewards (ranking points). Players […]
Measuring the Long-term Effects of Orphanhood
By Nicholas Thomas Gardner This paper works towards developing the narrative of orphans whose parent or parents died from natural disaster. By taking advantage of the unanticipated nature of death from the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, orphanhood can be treated as much closer to random than similar literature using data centered on HIV/AIDS related deaths. We […]
Obesity and its Impact on Job Quality
By Kelly Lessard This study explores the relationship between body mass and job quality in the United States labor force using five variables to represent job quality: hourly wage, training in the past year, desire for training, expectations for success, and job satisfaction. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data from 1994 to calculate BMI and assess the job quality […]
Is the Blind Side Tackle Worth It?: An Analysis of the Salary Allocation of the NFL Offensive Line
By Kelly Froelich The importance of the left tackle position in comparison to the other offensive line positions in the National Football League (NFL) has been widely debated amongst sports commentators, as the left tackle is traditionally the second highest paid player on a football team behind the quarterback; yet, this debate lacks empirical findings. […]
Capturing a College Education’s Impact on Industry Wages Across Time: An Analysis of Academic Factors that Affect Earnings
By Ian Low Studying how a college education can impact one’s wages has always been an area of interest amongst labor and education economists. While previous studies have stressed using single academic factors (i.e. college major choice, performance, or college prestige) to determine the effect on wages, there has not been a focus on predicting […]
