Job Market Paper

Soft Skills, Hard Times: Why New College Graduates Are Falling Behind
(with Aniket Baksy and Anushka Mitra)
The labor market outcomes for young college graduates have been worsening since the Great Recession. We document that this secular trend coincides with a rise in demand for soft skills by employers. We propose that this shift in skill demand disproportionately affects young workers, who have had less opportunity to accumulate these skills through on-the-job experience. To quantify this mechanism, we build a general equilibrium search model with heterogeneous agents and on-the-job skill accumulation, calibrated to the US labor market. A rise in demand for soft skills explains about one-third of the increase in the unemployment rate of young college graduates in this model. [Paper]

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.