Research

JOB MARKET PAPER

Shaping Young Minds: The Effects of Teachers on Social Skills - Single authored

Draft coming soon!

Abstract: Social skills are key drivers of wages, yet little is known about how they are produced. This paper estimates the impact of teachers on social skills and the labor market returns of these effects. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that teachers play a significant role in shaping students' social skills, as measured by a standardized personality test from which I extract indices of extroversion and conscientiousness. A one standard deviation improvement in both extroversion and conscientiousness teacher value-added leads to an approximately 0.07 standard deviation increase in both of these measures for their students. Test score value-added only weakly correlates with extroversion and conscientiousness value-added, which implies that current test score-based measures of teacher effectiveness fail to capture critical dimensions of teacher quality. Next, I show that these skills have large labor market returns using earnings data covering all graduates. Exposure to a one standard deviation higher conscientiousness value-added teacher leads to 1.2% higher earnings between ages 30-35, exceeding the earnings effect of test score value-added.  In the final part of the paper, I provide suggestive evidence showing that teacher training matters for all dimensions of value-added, suggesting that we can train more effective teachers.

Presented at: CEP Education Conference, LEER Conference, Helsinki GSE

Working Papers

Dating and breaking up with the boss: Economics benefits, costs, and spillovers  - With Emily Nix and David MacDonald Submitted
In the media: Financial Times ; Weekendavisen (in Danish)

Abstract: While many romantic relationships begin at work, intimate relationships between managers and subordinates have increasingly come under scrutiny. We use administrative data covering the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland over two decades to explore the career implications of dating and breaking up with a manager and spillovers on the wider workforce. Using a difference-in-differences across-couples research design we find that those in relationships with managers in their workplaces experience a 6% increase in their earnings compared to those in relationships with managers in different workplaces. Relationships between managers and subordinates last longer and both the manager and subordinate are more likely to remain in the same establishment. However, when a manager and subordinate break up, the subordinate is 13 percentage points more likely to drop out of employment. Last, we examine the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce. We document a 6 percentage point decrease in retention of other workers from these relationships, with significantly larger effects for smaller establishments and establishments where the subordinate had larger earnings gains. This result suggests that these relationships impose externalities on colleagues, including but not limited to exit from the firm.

Who's Hurt the Most? Impacts of Graduating Into a Recession by Education and Parental Background - Joint work with Martti Kaila and Emily Nix

Abstract: We estimate the earnings impacts of graduating into a recession across socioeconomic backgrounds through two innovations. First, given most people from low-income backgrounds do not attend university, we examine all education groups. We find large and persistent negative impacts on university graduates. In contrast, we only find short-run negative impacts for secondary and advanced-vocational graduates. Second, we find little evidence wealthier parents mitigate these income losses; small significant differences by parental background only appear for secondary graduates. We propose and test differential human capital accumulation on-the-job by education group and mobility as explanations for these results. 

The Impact of Peers on Occupational Choice and Long-Term Outcomes - Joint work with Samuel Solomon 

Abstract: Children are exposed to very different peers in childhood depending on where they grow up and which schools they attend. In this paper, we study the population-wide, long-term effect of peer composition in childhood on individuals' future occupational choices. We use within-school, across-cohort variation to identify the effects of peers on occupational choice and other outcomes. Using rich, population-wide administrative data from Finland, we show that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to children from a white collar parental background at age 15 has a significant effect on the likelihood of being in a white collar occupation at age 30. Furthermore, we show that there is a stronger effect at finer occupational levels and that these effects are strongest when one's own parent is from a different occupation. Finally, we compare the effect of schoolmates to those of other social ties. We find that the causal effects of peers in the neighborhood, while significant, are about half as large as the causal effects of peers in school 

Popular writing

"Die Zeit der Zäune" in Internationale Politik (2019) - together with Victoria Rietig. Available here.