Three Essays on Talent Selection and Allocation in the Economy

Abstract

This dissertation explores three different aspects of how talent gets allocated into jobs within the economy. First, with my coauthor David Deming, I explore the return to majoring in applied STEM fields by age, showing evidence that the return diminishes over the life-cycle. We hypothesize that this is due to the rapid rate of change in skill requirements in Computer Science and Engineering jobs and document various empirical facts consistent with this hypothesis. Second, with my coauthor Savannah Noray, I explore the hypothesis that frictions from communicating across different styles may increase employment segregation and contribute to labor market disparities between identity groups. Building on this intuition, we develop a simple model where jobs vary in the intensity of social interaction and the productivity of interactions is increasing in both social skills and cultural similarity of agents. Consistent with this, we show both descriptive and (plausibly) causal evidence that women, black Americans, and Latin American immigrants in the U.S. are more likely to work in social task intensive occupations in areas where their own group has higher labor market representation. And third, with my coauthor Namrata Narain, I study the heterogeneous treatment effects of a prominent sectoral job training program. We find evidence that poor, black, and female applicants reap lower earnings gains from the program and that this is best explained by an inability for these groups to get placed as effectively into high quality jobs at the end of the program (rather than by differences in character skill gains).