Deming, DavidWinkelmann, Joseph2026-03-0420262026-01-122026Winkelmann, Joseph. 2026. Essays on the Effects of Labor Market Change on Workers, Students, and Families. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32404566https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42731239This dissertation contains a series of essays that explore various ways in which labor market change affects people in their roles as workers, students, and household members. The first chapter studies how workers are affected by job displacement. Layoffs are a recurring feature of a dynamic economy. Prior research has used administrative records and survey data to document that layoffs impose large adjustment costs on displaced workers, and that these costs vary depending on labor market conditions around the time of the layoff. Compared to those established data sources, online resume data have the potential to provide richer and more timely insight into these adjustment costs for a larger number of workers. This chapter explores that potential. Based on the full list of advance notices of mass layoffs issued in California between 2014 and 2024, I identify establishments and workers who were exposed to one of these mass layoffs among a sample of 62 million LinkedIn profiles. Layoff events have a large effect on establishment size as measured in the LinkedIn data. I characterize the job transitions of workers who leave affected establishments around the layoff event along a rich set of measures, and estimate how their job transitions vary by occupational labor market size and the amount of competing labor supply at the time of the layoff. Workers laid off into less favorable labor market conditions are less likely to make an upward career transition, more likely to move to a new metro area, and more likely to enroll in a degree or certification program in response to the layoff. The second chapter, co-authored with Joshua Goodman, studies how higher education enrollment in the United States responds to labor market conditions. Declining college enrollments over the past 15 years have triggered questions about the health of the postsecondary sector. Using institution-level data, we make four points. First, such declines are driven not by the four-year sector but by two-year community colleges, which have apparently shrunk by over 30% since the peak of the Great Recession. Second, over one-third of this apparent decline is an artifact of some community colleges being reclassified as offering four-year degrees. Third, pre-Great Recession data shows a 1 percentage point increase in the local unemployment rate increases first-time community college enrollment by 2 percent, suggesting many students are on the margin between community college and job opportunities. For-profit college enrollments are similarly countercyclical, while public and private four-year college enrollments appear acyclical. Our estimates suggest that strengthening labor markets explain about 60% of the post-Great Recession decline in first-time community college enrollment. Fourth, students whose enrollment decisions are most sensitive to labor market conditions appear unlikely to have completed a degree. Though declining community college enrollments are a challenge for postsecondary institutions, it is less clear whether they signal a problem for students on the margin of enrollment. Finally, the third chapter, co-authored with Clara Chambers and Benjamin Goldman, studies how gender disparities in labor market and education outcomes are affecting marriage and family formation in the United States. Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling mostly men to enrolling mostly women, while the economic position of non-college men has weakened markedly. We examine how these changes correspond with the evolving structure of marriage markets across cohorts and places. As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying high-earning non-college men. This shift—combined with the broader economic decline of non-college men—has sharply reduced the pool of economically stable partners available to non-college women: the share of non-college men who earn above the national median and are not married to college women has fallen by more than 50%. Cross-area evidence shows that education gaps in marriage are smaller where non-college men face lower rates of joblessness and incarceration. Taken together, the evidence suggests that deteriorating outcomes for men have primarily undermined the marriage prospects of non-college women.application/pdfenEconomicsHigher educationThesis or Dissertation2026-03-040009-0002-7670-8032