Job Market Paper

Which Skills Matter? The Struggles of Young College Graduates in the Labor Market (Draft coming soon!)
(with Aniket Baksy and Anushka Mitra)
The unemployment rate for young college graduates has worsened in recent years. This has happened along with a rise in demand for noncognitive skills by employers. We argue that noncognitive skills can only be accumulated on the job, implying that the increase in demand for such skills harms young workers disproportionately since they enter the labor market without any work experience. We use a general equilibrium search-and-matching model with heterogeneous firms and workers, calibrated to the US labor market during the early 2010s to study this mechanism. Our model shows that skill-biased technical change shifts employer demand towards high-skilled workers, and this explains 36% of the worsening of the unemployment rate for young college graduates.

Working Papers

How Much Can I Make? Cross-Firm Pay Transparency’s Effects On the US Labor Market (Submitted)
(with Raymond He)
Many major US jurisdictions have implemented pay transparency laws that require firms to advertise wage offers in vacancy postings. Using data on the near universe of job postings and representative survey data in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that these laws increased the fraction of postings with wage information by 24.7 percentage points. This translated to average real wage increases of 3.2% - 4.4% in Colorado and 0.6% - 1.3% in California and Washington. We further consistently find significant positive effects on real wages for workers who are male, have a college degree, or are over forty years old.
[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Slides]

Can A More Generous US Unemployment Insurance System Improve Job Outcomes?
I study the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) on an unemployed individual’s job outcomes upon re-employment using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I find that a 10% increase in UI benefits leads to a 2.6% longer unemployment duration and 1.9-3.3% higher wages upon re-employment. This increase in wages is not driven by an improvement in match quality, since UI does not affect the match quality between an individual’s skills and the skill requirements of their occupation. Instead, a higher UI amount increases the value of remaining unemployed, allowing unemployed individuals to bargain for higher wages.