Research

Working Papers

Skill-Biased Technological Change, Inequality, and the Role of Retraining (Job market paper)

The collapse of routine occupations driven by skill-biased technological change has shrunk economic opportunities for less-educated workers. Retraining could provide the workers displaced by occupational decline with opportunities to gain skills that growing occupations require. In this paper, I study the equilibrium effects of retraining in an economy with directed job search. Not only does retraining improve participants' skills, it also changes non-participants' optimal job search strategies and, in turn, their re-employment outcomes. I find that retraining reduces between-skill inequality whereas it increases within-skill inequality. Eliminating retraining makes everyone worse off, causing losses equivalent to a 1.5 percent drop in consumption. I also evaluate various labor market policies that aim to encourage retraining participation. I show that combining retraining with a more generous unemployment insurance benefit is the most cost-effective policy. It also results in the highest average welfare.

The Static and Dynamic Effects of Collaboration with Douglas Hanley and Sewon Hur

This paper investigates the effects of academic collaboration on research productivity. We specify a functional relationship between researchers' human capital and research outcomes. In our framework, the human capital of a group of researchers is combined by the CES production technology and produces a research outcome measured by the quality of the paper. We estimate the production function using the information on published articles in the field of Economics and Business. The estimated elasticity of substitution suggests that researchers are imperfect complements. We use the estimates to simulate the growth of human capital of a researcher under different collaboration scenarios. We find that collaborating with an equally productive coauthor generates a considerable increase in human capital. The effects of collaboration persist over time. We show that the link between human capital and collaboration opportunities play an important role in explaining this persistence.

Works in Progress

Gender Gap in Retraining with Stefania Albanesi

Retraining rates are higher for female than male unemployed workers. Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we show that the gender gap in retraining participation cannot be explained by differences in marital status, industry and occupation distribution, and wealth between males and females. We explore the role of social skills in understanding gender disparities in retraining participation. The return to social skills has been increasing since the 1980s. Employment and wage growth have been the strongest in occupations that require high levels of social skills as well as cognitive skills, which a series of psychological and neuroscientific evidence suggest females have a comparative advantage of. This could increase the benefits of retraining more for females than males. We develop a model to quantitatively measures the contribution of the female advantage in social skills to the gender differences in retraining participation.

Racial bias in Citations with Hyun Kyoung Ro