Works in Progress

Short n' Steep: Wage Growth Maximizing Job Ladders with Heterogeneous Skills and Risk Preferences (Job Market Paper)
This paper examines job transitions and wage growth for young workers using detailed panel data on work histories, heterogeneous risk preferences, and a task-based measure of skill distance. It provides new evidence on how “steep” transitions—moves to jobs for which workers are relatively underskilled—affect short- and long-term wage outcomes. These transitions yield immediate wage growth premiums, contrary to the expectation that skill mismatch penalizes wage growth, suggesting productivity benefits that overshadow mismatch costs. However, it appears that workers struggle to target strictly upward moves (moves to higher-skill jobs), prompting a proposed framework in which larger transitions are riskier due to information frictions. Supporting this, risk-tolerant workers are observed to make more frequent and larger transitions, though many of these transitions are downward. A model grounded in these findings quantifies the joint implications of risk aversion and skill alignment concerns in job mobility, showing that the degree to which workers’ hesitance to make larger occupational transitions is due to risk preferences versus skill deficiency has important policy implications for the efficacy of training and re-skilling programs.

The Relationship Between the 'Norm to Work' and Labor Market Outcomes (NSF funded)
This project investigates the role of norms and attitudes toward work in shaping labor market outcomes. Media narratives and existing research suggest such norms are important drivers of worker behavior and, ultimately, macroeconomic outcomes like labor supply and wages, but this idea has not been tested empirically due to the difficulty of measuring norms. I construct a novel measure of work norms using unstructured text data from Twitter, combined with a custom-built machine learning model to label the text. I then use this measure to examine the relationship between work norms and labor market outcomes such as labor force participation, employment, wages, and labor's share of income. I also use this measure to test the prevailing media narrative that Covid meaningfully changed attitudes towards work in the U.S., and that this shift in attitudes was one driver of the “great resignation” observed starting in late 2020.
Extended Abstract

Can Matching on Soft Skills Yield Better Firm-Worker Matches? with Rob Garlick, Lukas Hensel, and Kate Orkin
Many developing country labor markets have significant frictions that dampen productivity. Firm-worker matches are relatively unproductive and poorly-paid, partly because firms have limited information about workseekers’ skills. These inefficiencies may deter firms from hiring and result in lower wages, slowing economic growth and exacerbating poverty among jobseekers. We develop and test a system to match workseekers to jobs based on soft skills. We aim to speed transitions out of unemployment, increase labor demand, increase productivity and wages, and improve labor market access for disadvantaged groups. We test this intervention in partnership with Harambee, Africa’s largest employment services provider. We assess Harambee-recruited workseekers’ soft skills using new online measures and conduct a randomized controlled trial to test whether matching workseekers to jobs based on soft skills, in addition to more traditional criteria such as education and work experience, improves labor market outcomes.
Extended Abstract      AEA trial registration