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Author: McGee, Andrew Dunstan
Resulting in 7 citations.
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Light, Audrey L. McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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Does Employer Learning Vary by Schooling Attainment? The Answer Depends on How Career Start Dates are Defined Labour Economics 32 (January 2015): 57-66. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537114001456 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Career Patterns; Educational Attainment; Learning Hypothesis; Methods/Methodology; Transition, School to Work; Work Experience We demonstrate that empirical evidence of employer learning is sensitive to how we define the career start date and, in turn, measure cumulative work experience. Arcidiacono et al. (2010) find evidence of employer learning for high school graduates but not for college graduates, and conclude that high levels of schooling reveal true productivity. We show that their choice of start date--based on nonenrollment at survey interview dates and often triggered by school vacation--systematically overstates experience and biases learning estimates towards zero for college-educated workers. Using career start dates tied to a more systematic definition of school exit, we find that employer learning is equally evident for high school and college graduates. |
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Bibliography Citation
Light, Audrey L. and Andrew Dunstan McGee. "Does Employer Learning Vary by Schooling Attainment? The Answer Depends on How Career Start Dates are Defined." Labour Economics 32 (January 2015): 57-66.
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Light, Audrey L. McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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Employer Learning and the “Importance” of Skills IZA Discussion Paper No. 6623, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), June 2012 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Occupational Information Network (O*NET); Skills; Wage Determination Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. We ask whether the role of employer learning in the wage-setting process depends on skill type and skill importance to productivity. Combining data from the NLSY79 with O*NET data, we use Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery scores to measure seven distinct types of pre-market skills that employers cannot readily observe, and O*NET importance scores to measure the importance of each skill for the worker’s current three-digit occupation. Before bringing importance measures into the analysis, we find evidence of employer learning for each skill type, for college and high school graduates, and for blue and white collar workers. Moreover, we find that the extent of employer learning – which we demonstrate to be directly identified by magnitudes of parameter estimates after simple manipulation of the data – does not vary significantly across skill type or worker type. Once we allow parameters identifying employer learning and screening to vary by skill importance, we find evidence of distinct tradeoffs between learning and screening, and considerable heterogeneity across skill type and skill importance. For some skills, increased importance leads to more screening and less learning; for others, the opposite is true. Our evidence points to heterogeneity in the degree of employer learning that is masked by disaggregation based on schooling attainment or broad occupational categories. |
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Bibliography Citation
Light, Audrey L. and Andrew Dunstan McGee. "Employer Learning and the “Importance” of Skills." IZA Discussion Paper No. 6623, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), June 2012. |
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McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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Essays on the Role of Noncognitive Skills in Decision-Making Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2010. Also: http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/McGee%20Andrew%20Dunstan.pdf?osu1275349192 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Disability; GED/General Educational Diploma/General Equivalency Degree/General Educational Development; Geographical Variation; High School Diploma; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pearlin Mastery Scale; Risk-Taking; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (see Self-Esteem); Rotter Scale (see Locus of Control); Unemployment Rate Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. While "ability" has long featured prominently in economic models and empirical studies of labor markets, economists have only recently begun to consider how personality and attitudes--noncognitive factors--influence behavior both from a theoretical and empirical standpoint. This dissertation incorporates noncognitive factors into economic models of search and educational attainment and examines how these factors influence behavior using survey and experimental data. Chapter 1 considers how locus of control--the degree to which one believes one's actions influence outcomes--affects unemployed job search. Assuming that locus of control is a determinant of beliefs about the efficacy of search effort, the model predicts that "internal" individuals (who believe their actions determine outcomes) search more intensively and set higher reservation wages than their "external" counterparts (who believe their actions have little effect on outcomes). Using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that, consistent with these predictions, "internal" job seekers search more intensively and set higher reservation wages than do their more "external" peers, but are no better at converting search effort into job offers and earn no more than their peers upon finding employment conditional on reservation wages. The findings also indicate that very "internal" individuals hold out for excessively high wages while very "external" individuals search too little. As a result, both groups spend more time unemployed than individuals with average loci of control. Chapter 2 tests the hypothesis that locus of control affects search behavior by influencing beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment in which subjects exert effort to generate offers. There are two experimental treatments: a limited information treatment in which subjects exert effort without knowledge of how their effort influences the generation of offers and a f ull information treatment in which subjects are informed of this relationship. I find that in the limited information treatment more "internal" subjects exert more effort and hold out for higher offers than more "external" subjects, but there is no such relationship in the full information treatment when uncertainty about the connection between effort and outcomes does not exist. In both treatments, however, I find that "externality" is positively related to the probability that an individual "quits" searching, suggesting that locus of control may play a key role in explaining "discouragement" among searchers Chapter 3 examines how learning disabled youth fare in high school relative to observationally equivalent peers in terms of cognitive and noncognitive skills. Learning disabled youth in my sample are six percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than peers with the same measured cognitive ability. This difference cannot be explained by differences in noncognitive skills, families, or school resources. Instead, I find that learning disabled students graduate from high school at higher rates because of high school graduation policies making it easier for learning disabled youth to obtain a high school diploma. The effects of these graduation policies are even more remarkable given that I find evidence after high school that learning disabled youth have less unmeasured human capital. [NOTE: This chapter is based on the Children of the NLSY79 and the NLSY79 Young Adult.] |
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Bibliography Citation
McGee, Andrew Dunstan. Essays on the Role of Noncognitive Skills in Decision-Making. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2010.. |
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McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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How the Perception of Control Influences Unemployed Job Search Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Review 68,1 (January 2015): 184-211. Also: http://ilr.sagepub.com/content/68/1/184.full Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Sage Publications Keyword(s): Control; Job Search; Locus of Control (see Rotter Scale); Unemployment Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The author considers how locus of control--the degree to which one believes one's actions influence outcome--is related to an unemployed person's job search. He finds evidence that "internal" job seekers (who believe their actions determine outcomes) set higher reservation wages than do their more "external" counterparts (who believe their actions have little effect on outcomes) and weak evidence that internal job seekers search more intensively. Consistent with the assumption that locus of control influences job search through an effect on beliefs about the return to search effort, internal job seekers are no better at converting search effort into job offers and earn no more than their peers upon finding employment. |
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Bibliography Citation
McGee, Andrew Dunstan. "How the Perception of Control Influences Unemployed Job Search." Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Review 68,1 (January 2015): 184-211.
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| 5. |
McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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Skills, Standards, and Disabilities: How Youth with Learning Disabilities Fare in High School and Beyond Economics of Education Review 30,1 (February 2011): 109-129. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710001044 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Disability; GED/General Educational Diploma/General Equivalency Degree/General Educational Development; Geographical Variation; High School Completion/Graduates; High School Diploma; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pearlin Mastery Scale; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (see Self-Esteem); Unemployment Rate, Regional Learning disabled youth in the Child and Young Adult samples of the NLSY79 are more likely to graduate from high school than peers with the same measured cognitive ability, a difference that cannot be explained by differences in noncognitive skills, families, or school resources. Instead, I find that learning disabled students graduate from high school at higher rates than youth with the same cognitive abilities because of high school graduation policies that make it easier for learning disabled youth to obtain a high school diploma. The effects of these graduation policies are even more remarkable given that I find evidence that learning disabled youth have less unmeasured human capital than observationally equivalent youth as after high school they are less likely to be employed or continue on to college and earn less than their observationally equivalent non-learning disabled peers. |
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Bibliography Citation
McGee, Andrew Dunstan. "Skills, Standards, and Disabilities: How Youth with Learning Disabilities Fare in High School and Beyond." Economics of Education Review 30,1 (February 2011): 109-129.
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| 6. |
McGee, Andrew Dunstan |
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Skills, Standards, and Disabilities: How Youth with Learning Disabilities Fare in High School and Beyond Working Paper, Department of Economics, Ohio State University, January 2010. Also: http://web.econ.ohio-state.edu/~amcgee/LDhsgradver7_JAN10.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult Publisher: Department of Economics, The Ohio State University Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Disability; GED/General Educational Diploma/General Equivalency Degree/General Educational Development; Geographical Variation; High School Completion/Graduates; High School Diploma; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pearlin Mastery Scale; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) (see Self-Esteem); Unemployment Rate, Regional Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This study examines the effects of having a learning disability on high school graduation and other post-secondary outcomes. Controlling for skills, personal and family characteristics, school resources and policies, and other factors, I find that youth with learning disabilities are more likely to graduate from high school than their observationally equivalent peers. To examine whether this success is the result of the additional attention and resources devoted to youth with learning disabilities or the lower standards to which they may be held, I study how these youth fare after high school. While I find evidence consistent with youth with learning disabilities acquiring additional skills as a result of the attention and resources devoted to them, my findings strongly suggest that they benefit from being held to lower standard standards in high school. |
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Bibliography Citation
McGee, Andrew Dunstan. "Skills, Standards, and Disabilities: How Youth with Learning Disabilities Fare in High School and Beyond." Working Paper, Department of Economics, Ohio State University, January 2010. |
| 7. |
McGee, Andrew Dunstan McGee, Peter Pan, Jessica |
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Performance Pay, Competitiveness, and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence from the United States Economics Letters 128 (March 2015): 35-38. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176515000142 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Gender Differences; Performance pay; Wage Differentials; Wage Gap We show that women in the NLSY79 and NLSY97 are less likely than men to receive competitive compensation. The portion of the gender wage gap explained by compensation schemes is small in the NLSY79 but somewhat larger in the NLSY97. |
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Bibliography Citation
McGee, Andrew Dunstan, Peter McGee and Jessica Pan. "Performance Pay, Competitiveness, and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence from the United States." Economics Letters 128 (March 2015): 35-38.
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