The JHR

@j-humanresources.bsky.social

194 Followers 77 Following

The Journal of Human Resources is a leading journal in empirical microeconomics, with a focus on policy-relevant research. https://jhr.uwpress.org/

Employers’ Language Proficiency Requirements and Hiring of Immigrants Magnus Carlsson, Stefan Eriksson, and Dan-Olof Rooth Labor markets in advanced economies have undergone substantial change due to globalization, technological improvements, and organizational changes, making language proficiency increasingly important even in less skilled jobs. Has this development led employers to shy away from hiring immigrants with limited host-country language skills? We shed light on this question by conducting a large-scale field experiment, where we introduce common second-language features in immigrants’ resumes. We also conduct employer surveys to interpret our experimental results. Our main finding is that language proficiency has a strong positive effect on being invited to a job interview, even in typical immigrant entry jobs.
Teacher Testing Standards and the New Teacher Pipeline Marc T. Law, Mindy S. Marks and Tomer Stern We examine the impact of changes in testing standards on the new teacher pipeline by exploiting a quasi-experimental change in the minimum passing score required for admission into teacher training programs. Using institution-level data, we find that higher testing standards sharply reduce teacher preparation program enrollments and graduations. Increases in testing standards are also associated with declines in the number of new teacher licenses awarded. According to our estimates, the average increase in standards led to a nine percent decrease in graduations from teacher training programs, accounting for more than one-third of the overall decline in teacher training graduates.
Can Academic Redshirting Shrink the Education Gender Gap? Causal Evidence on Student Achievement and Mental Health Tímea Laura Molnár I study voluntary delays in the school entry of age-eligible children (“academic redshirting”), using Hungarian administrative test score and medical prescription data, and mental health surveys. I identify a new Local Average Treatment Effect of starting school a year older due to redshirting, by exploiting a school-readiness evaluation required only for potentially redshirted children born before January 1. Instrumenting with post-January 1 births, I estimate effects for non-schoolready children who could overcome developmental deficits with redshirting but are deterred by the evaluation. I find improved test scores, high school track choices, educational aspirations, and graduation rates—but only for boys, who are also less anxious, more confident, and less bullied. Redshirting thus shrinks gender gaps, such as closing the high school completion gap by 60 percent.
Working From Home and Wage Dynamics Gonzalo Castex and Evgenia Dechter We study how working from home (WFH) relates to wages and wage growth. We propose a labor supply framework with WFH and on-site work modes, and an empirical strategy linking work arrangements to wages and wage growth while addressing selection into WFH. We find no statistically significant relationship between WFH and contemporaneous wages. Men with higher WFH intensity experience slower wage growth; estimates for women are not distinguishable from zero. These patterns are unlikely to be explained by occupational composition or selection. The findings are consistent with WFH affecting human capital accumulation inputs, while having limited implications for contemporaneous productivity.
Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling & Anastasia Terskaya We estimate the effects of large, positive wealth shocks on marriage and fertility among Swedish lottery players. For male winners, wealth increases marriage formation and fertility and likely reduces divorce risk. For female winners, the only clear effect is a higher short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk. The gendered treatment effects are often similar to income gradients. Our findings align with models in which wives derive greater marginal utility from consumption when single than when married, whereas the opposite holds for husbands—but only if marital property is divided unequally upon divorce. We provide descriptive evidence consistent with such unequal division.
The Journal of Human Resources Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adrana Lleras-Muney Special Issue Guest Editors
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Violence from Unmitigated Heat in Prison Anita Mukherjee and Nicholas J. Sanders Prison temperatures in the southern United States frequently exceed dangerous heat index levels and lack temperature controls. Using a unique daily panel of prisoner incidents from correctional facilities spread across the state of Mississippi, a system without air conditioning, we show that hot days increase both the rates and probabilities of severe violent acts by prisoners by approximately 20%. The effects of heat appear neither cumulative nor the result of temporal displacement. These results help inform constitutional concerns of incarceration in extreme temperatures, and document a potentially growing social cost of shifting climate.
Teaching Teachers to Use Computer Assisted Learning Effectively: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence Philip Oreopoulos, Chloe R. Gibbs, Michael Jensen and Joseph P. Price In two field experiments, we test the efficacy of a program designed to encourage greater mastery learning through technology and continuous teacher support. Focusing on elementary and middle school mathematics, teachers receive weekly coaching and guide students through customized, incremental roadmaps. Results indicate significant intent-to-treat effects on math performance of 0.12–0.22 standard deviations. Further analysis shows that these gains are concentrated in classrooms that average 35 minutes or more of practice per week. Teachers able to achieve high-dosage practice have a high degree of initial buy-in, a clear implementation strategy, and a willingness to closely monitor progress.
Teacher’s Pet: The Effect of Student Rank on Teacher Ability Beliefs Max Coveney This paper shows that teacher beliefs about a child’s absolute academic ability are shaped by the child’s relative classroom rank. Using administrative data on Dutch primary school students, I show that teachers are more likely to recommend students with a high (low) academic rank to the most (least) academically demanding track, independent of actual academic achievement. Higher-ranked students attend more academically prestigious secondary school tracks and are more likely to attend university. These findings are replicated using alternative data and methods. The effect cannot be attributed to differences in children’s non-cognitive skills by rank.
Mothers’ Sorting into Lower-Paying Firms: The Gendered Firm Premium Differentials After Childbirth in the French Labor Market Elise Coudin, Sophie Maillard, Maxime Tô and Julie Tréguier Examining firm-specific wage premiums’ contribution to child-penalties, we find mothers experience 39% income decline relative to fathers following childbirth, with 9% hourly wage penalty. Using French employer-employee data (1995-2021), we show firm premiums account for 10% of wage penalty, from mothers sorting into lower-paying firms rather than receiving lower premiums within firms. After childbirth, mothers sort into firms offering characteristics more conducive to reconciling family and professional lives: part-time work and proximity to home. These findings suggest that addressing the child-penalty requires policies enabling mothers to apply to or remain in high-paying firms, rather than focusing solely on within-firm disparities.
E-Commerce as a Driver of Gender Equity: Labor Supply and Household Outcomes in Rural China Zengdong Cao, Wei Huang, Jinyang Ren and Hantao Wu We study China’s Rural E-Commerce Development program, a large-scale digital infrastructure initiative, to assess its labor market and household impacts. Exploiting county-level rollout variation and panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (2012-2020), we find that the program raised female labor force participation by 3 percentage points and weekly hours by 2.5, with no comparable effects for men. It also promoted women’s entrepreneurship, enhanced intra-household bargaining power, and improved daughters’ education and health. A cost-benefit analysis indicates income gains far exceed program costs, underscoring digital infrastructure’s potential to foster gender equity and intergenerational human capital in rural China.
Effects of the Child Protection System on Parents Marie-Pascale Grimon Child protective services investigate a third of child-homes for maltreatment, yet repercussions for parents remain unclear. I show that mothers face considerable adversity when referred for alleged child maltreatment. Using a novel strategy that combines event studies with variation in intervention tendency across investigators, I find that child protective services interventions increase mothers’ enrollment in mental health and substance abuse treatment services for a year, even when those services are not mandated. Earnings and employment are unaffected. Marginal interventions can lead to persistent involvement with social services for years.
Understanding Gender Match Effects in Higher Education: The Role of Class Size Stephan Maurer, Guido Schwerdt and Simon Wiederhold It is widely believed that female students perform better when taught by female professors. However, little is known about the mechanisms explaining these gender match effects. Using administrative records from a German public university, which cover all programs and courses between 2006 and 2018, we show that gender match effects are sizable in smaller classes, but are absent in larger classes. These results suggest that direct and frequent interactions between students and professors are crucial for gender match effects to emerge. In contrast, the mere fact that one’s professor is female is not sufficient to increase performance of female students.
The Demand Side of Africa’s Demographic Transition: Desired Fertility, Wealth, and Jobs Céline Zipfel This paper investigates the relationship between desired fertility, wealth, and female employment in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While ideal family size is generally higher at all levels of wealth in SSA, the gap relative to other regions is substantially larger among poorer households and narrows with wealth. Additionally, poorer women in SSA are less likely to work for wages. Examining the relationship between these two patterns reveals a negative correlation between desired fertility and wage work prevalence across SSA provinces, a trend virtually absent in other regions. Furthermore, within SSA provinces, increases in the share of women engaged in wage work over time are associated with a flatter wealth-desired fertility gradient.
Do More Public Sector School Resources Increase Learning Outcomes? Evidence from a Comprehensive Education Reform in Peruvian Secondary Schools Jorge M. Agüero, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, and Alan Sánchez We evaluate a large-scale government reform in Peruvian public secondary schools that lengthened the school day and invested in pedagogy, staffing, and infrastructure. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that the program increased math and reading test scores by approximately 0.185 SD and 0.102 SD, respectively. For math only, we estimate that instructional time contributes approximately two-thirds of the effect, suggesting the importance of complementary inputs. The reform effectively enhanced school resources and increased students’ overall study time. Relative to other education interventions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, the program delivered above-average learning gains but was relatively expensive.
Lena Hensvik Professor Uppsala University Coeditor Journal of Human Resources Editorial Board
Labor Market Institutions and Wage-Setting Power: Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean Francesco Amodio, Emanuele Brancati, Nicolás de Roux, and Michele Di Maio We measure firms’ wage-setting power in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Exploiting variation in firms’ exposure to trade and exchange rates, we generate shocks to labor demand to trace out firm-level labor supply curves and quantify labor market power. We estimate an inverse labor supply elasticity of 0.82, implying that workers receive 55 cents per additional dollar produced. Wage-setting power is significantly higher among firms in countries with lower union density, limited collective bargaining, and no unemployment protection. This underscores the role of labor market institutions in shaping firms’ wagesetting power and the distribution of the gains from trade.
Diversifying the STEM Pipeline: Evidence from STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Sarah R. Cohodes, Helen Ho, and Silvia C. Robles Pipeline programs intended to increase diversity in STEM fields are common, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a suite of such programs targeted to underrepresented high school students and hosted at an elite technical institution. Students offered seats in the STEM summer programs were likelier to enroll in, persist through, and graduate from elite colleges and to graduate with a degree in a STEM field. These improvements in college outcomes raised predicted earnings by 3–15 percent.
Mike Lovenheim Professor, Cornell University Editor Journal of Human Resources
Sergio Urzúa Professor, University of Maryland Coeditor, Journal of Human Resources Editorial Board
Revisiting the Long-Term Effects of Political Violence on Human Capital Accumulation in Peru: A Replication of Leon (2012) César A. Huaroto, Fredy Gonzales and Alexander Pacheco Leon (2012) found that exposure to political violence in Peru during childhood negatively affected completed schooling using a 2 percent sample of the 1993 and 2007 censuses. When using the full sample in 1993, we find statistically significant effects of exposure pre-conception, violating the parallel pre-trends assumptions of Leon (2012). We also find that the long-run effects (measured in 2007) are smaller in magnitude using the full census. Finally, we show valid evidence of an actual adverse impact of political violence, but only for those exposed in utero.
Cash Welfare and Health Spending Jeffrey Hicks I explore the interplay between cash welfare and health-related outcomes using Canadian administrative data. Healthcare use rises sharply before a welfare application, especially for plausibly work-limiting diagnoses, then partially normalizes within three years. Using application adjudicators’ decisions as "judge IVs", I estimate that welfare receipt has limited effects on subsequent health-related outcomes. Because Canadian healthcare is free and universal, these findings are unrelated to health insurance. An exception is pharmaceuticals, which are free for welfare recipients but not for non-recipients — consistent with this, welfare receipt strongly increases pharmaceutical use, implying that incomplete insurance limits medication among those excluded from welfare.
Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health Sara Abrahamsson The rapid rise in smartphone use among youth has raised concerns about its effects on well-being and learning. Using administrative and survey data with an event-study design, I show that banning smartphones in middle schools has no average effect on education or mental health but masks important gender differences. Bans reduce psychological health care use among girls, lower bullying for both genders, and improve girls’ GPAs and academic track placement, especially among those from disadvantaged backgrounds. These results suggest smartphone bans can be a low-cost policy to improve outcomes, particularly for girls.
Teacher Perceptions, Test Scores, and Racial Disparities in the Classroom: Evidence from the US Maria Zhu This study provides new insights on the expression of bias through disparate treatment of students by race. Specifically, I examine racial discrepancies in teachers’ evaluations of student achievement, conditional on standardized test achievement. After correcting for measurement error in standardized test scores, results indicate that teachers evaluate Black students as higher achieving than White students with the same standardized test performance. This finding contrasts with previous research on Black-White teacher assessment gaps outside of the US. These results are consistent with multiple potential mechanisms, such as teachers holding lower expectations for Black students or bias embedded in standardized tests.
Birds of a Feather Earn Together: Gender and Peer Effects at the Workplace Julián Messina, Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano and Anastasia Terskaya Utilizing comprehensive administrative data from Brazil, we investigate the impact of peer effects on wages, considering both within-gender and cross-gender dynamics. Since the average productivity of both individuals and their peers is unobservable, we estimate these values using worker fixed effects while accounting for occupational and firm sorting. Our findings reveal that within-gender peer effects have approximately twice the influence of cross-gender peer effects on wages for both men and women. Furthermore, we observe a reduction in the disparity between these two types of peer effects in settings characterized by greater gender equality.
Search, Acute Illness, and Absenteeism Pyoungsik Kim This paper examines the economic costs of absenteeism from acute illness, which reduces labor market participation and burdens workers and firms. I extend a search, matching, and bargaining framework to incorporate medical care use, illness dynamics, health capital, and employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI). Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), I estimate the model and find that acute illness lowers productivity, raises medical expenditures, and reduces welfare. Counterfactual analyses show subsidizing health capital improves total welfare. Moreover, while both a universal ESHI mandate and a penalty-based policy expand coverage, the penalty-based approach yields greater welfare gains.
License on the Way: The Effects of Expedited Licensure for Migrant Workers Kihwan Bae Occupational licenses are not easily portable across states or national borders, creating labor market frictions for migrant workers. This study examines whether expedited licensing programs reduce these frictions for military spouses, a group of tied migrants who frequently relocate across states. I find that following the programs, the employment rate significantly increased among military spouses who recently moved across states. Consequently, military spouses in licensed occupations earned more from work and received less unemployment compensation in the year of migration. These findings highlight expedited licensure as an effective policy tool for reducing occupational licensing barriers associated with interstate migration.
Integration or Isolation? The Impact of Retirement on Social Capital Kadir Atalay, Anita Staneva and Rong Zhu This paper examines the causal impact of retirement on social capital using nationally representative Australian panel data. Exploiting the eligibility age for the Age Pension, we find that retirement significantly enhances social capital by increasing social connectedness and community involvement. These gains improve physical and mental health, with effects comparable to those of physical activity. However, older individuals’ perceptions of social relationships remain unchanged. Our findings highlight a key policy tradeoff: while raising the retirement age may boost labor force participation, it may reduce opportunities for meaningful social engagement and, in turn, undermine the health of older adults.
JHR Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adriana Lleras-Muney, Special Issue Guest Editors
Andrew Goodman-Bacon photo Economist, Fed Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Coeditor Journal of Human Resources Editorial Board
Determinants of Mortality Special Issue
Does Immigration Improve Quality of Care in Nursing Homes? Delia Furtado and Francesc Ortega We explore how immigration can help mitigate nursing home staffing shortages, which are likely to worsen as baby boomers age. We show that local increases in immigration lead to fewer falls, less use of restraints, and fewer pressure ulcers among nursing home residents, as well as improvements in other measures of quality of care. Consistent with a labor market explanation, we find that immigration increases the local supply of workers in nursing fields, with the largest effect on the number of nurse aides—the workers primarily responsible for hands-on care in nursing homes.
Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adriana Lleras-Muney, Special Issue Guest Editors
submission page
Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices William N. Evans and Ethan M.J. Lieber A county’s fraction of adults in 1990 on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is a strong predictor of growth in local drug death rates after 2000. The part of the SSDI rate related to drug deaths is not proxying for well-known contributors to the drug crisis, e.g. OxyContin. Instead, it appears to capture the fraction of people in chronic pain. We show that in the late 1990s, physicians began prescribing opioids more aggressively to treat pain. Taken together, our estimates suggest that drug deaths rates would be 43% lower in 2015 had prescribing practices stayed at 1995 levels.
Deaths per 100,000 by Daily temperature for different sectors, primary, not employed, service sector, technical/manual, and professional/managerial
The Journal of Human Resources Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adriana Lleras-Muney, Special Issue Guest Editors
Employers’ Language Proficiency Requirements and Hiring of Immigrants Magnus Carlsson, Stefan Eriksson and Dan-Olof Rooth Labor markets in advanced economies have undergone substantial change due to globalization, technological improvements, and organizational changes, making language proficiency increasingly important even in less skilled jobs. Has this development led employers to shy away from hiring immigrants with limited host-country language skills? We shed light on this question by conducting a large-scale field experiment, where we introduce common second-language features in immigrants’ resumes. We also conduct employer surveys to interpret our experimental results. Our main finding is that language proficiency has a strong positive effect on being invited to a job interview, even in typical immigrant entry jobs.
Schools as Safety Nets: Break-downs and Recovery in Reporting of Violence Against Children Pilar Larroulet, Daniel Pailañir, Daniela Quintana, and Damian Clarke Schools are a key channel for formally reporting violence against children, but this channel broke down with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study how widespread such reporting declines were and to what extent they were recovered once schools reopened. Examining the universe of all criminal reports of violence against children in Chile, we observe sharp declines in reports of all types of violence (psychological, physical, and sexual), and find that full recovery in reporting had not occurred even nearly 2 years following initial school closures. Extending beyond the unexpected and long school closures during the pandemic, we find evidence of clear declines in violence reporting during regular school vacations and in a period of student strikes at the secondary level, suggesting a broader relevance of these results.
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Russell Weinstein
Reconsidering Peer Effects from Schoolmates Exposed to Violence at Home Jarod Apperson and Carycruz Bueno Prior research suggests that students exposed to domestic violence impose substantial negative externalities on peers’ learning and labor market outcomes. We test whether these findings generalize using nine-years of student data from a large urban school district linked to geocoded police records of at-home violence. In contrast to prior work, we find negligible peer effects. Adding one exposed peer to a classroom of 20 students reduces English and math scores by a statistically insignificant 0.006 standard deviations and increases disciplinary incidents by 3.2%. We reject achievement reductions greater than 0.017 standard deviations and disciplinary increases larger than 8.3%.
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Evan Soltas
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Jesse Rothstein
Quality and selection in regulated professions Gaetano Basso, Eleonora Brandimarti, Michele Pellizzari and Giovanni Pica Entry into many occupations is regulated to screen out the least able candidates, but available evidence suggests that this objective is rarely achieved. Using microdata covering the universe of Italian law school graduates (2007-2013), we show that this result is largely due to the strong intergenerational transmission of occupations within regulated professions. We find that having relatives already active as lawyers significantly increases the probability of passing the entry exam and boosts earnings, particularly for those who performed poorly in law school.
2025 Excellence in Reviewing Evan Riehl
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Todd Pugatch
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Mindy Marks
Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century Rowena Gray, Siobhan O’Keefe, Sarah Quincy and Zachary Ward We present new evidence on the long-run evolution of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred after 1960. Longitudinal data suggests that task transitions were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial tasks, though gaps decreased after 1940. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work in all periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks widen Black-white inequality.
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Karen Kopecky
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Chris Karbownik
Excellence in reviewing 2025 Ethan Kaplan
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Mark Hoekstra
Steven Hemelt Excellence in Reviewing 2025
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Julien Grenet
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Jonathan Davis
Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Brian Cadena
Highly Cited Paper Award 2025 Robots, Marriageable Men, Family, and Fertility Massimo Anelli, Osea Giuntella & Luca Stella
The Journal of Human Resources Call for Editor
Graphic: The Journal of Human Resources Call for Editor