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Source: Society of Labor Economists Annual Meeting

Resulting in 4 citations.

1.	Grogger, Jeffrey
1.	Speech and Wages Presented: Montreal, Society of Labor Economists World Meeting, June 2015. Also: http://www.sole-jole.org/15431.pdf Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Keyword(s): Behavior; Paradata; Wages Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Speech is fundamentally human behavior and a topic that has been widely studied. I ask two questions here that have nevertheless received little research attention. The first is whether a worker's speech, in his native language, is related to his wages. The second is whether speech is responsive to economic incentives. To do this I collected audio data, which I transformed and merged to respondents from the NLSY97. The results show that there is a wage premium for mainstream speech that is not explained by education, test scores, family background, or a set of other worker characteristics. The premium is large for workers with more than a high school education and small to non-existent among workers with less schooling. The results suggest that in areas where the mainstream speech premium is higher, at least some speakers are more likely to acquire mainstream speech patterns as children.
	Bibliography Citation Grogger, Jeffrey. "Speech and Wages." Presented: Montreal, Society of Labor Economists World Meeting, June 2015.

2.	Sanders, Carl
2.	Reading Skills and Earnings: Why Do Doing Words Good Hurt You’re Wages? Presented: Montreal, Society of Labor Economics World Meeting, June 2015. Also: http://www.sole-jole.org/15504.pdf Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Earnings; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty; Wage Theory Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In a reading comprehension test administered to American youth in 1980 by the National Longitudinal Survey, a one standard deviation increase in reading scores is associated with a 1.5% decrease in later wages after conditioning on the youths' other scores on math, science, and personality tests. This goal of this paper is to explain this negative conditional relationship between the reading test score and wages, which I call the reading penalty. In the first section of the paper, I consider and reject a number of statistical objections to the existence of the reading penalty. In the second section, I construct a simple generalized Roy model that offers two distinct economic explanations for the reading penalty. The first explanation is the starving artist, where reading skills are a proxy for preferences for low-wage jobs, while the second is the bad sign, where high reading test scores proxy for a lack of other productive attributes. In the final section, I use the NLSY data and the identification from the model to determine which economic explanation of the reading penalty is most plausible. I find weak support for the starving artist hypothesis. On the other hand, I find evidence in favor of the bad sign explanation: higher reading comprehension scores may signal a lack of organizational skills.
	Bibliography Citation Sanders, Carl. "Reading Skills and Earnings: Why Do Doing Words Good Hurt You’re Wages?" Presented: Montreal, Society of Labor Economics World Meeting, June 2015.

3.	Sanders, Carl
3.	Skill Uncertainty, Skill Accumulation, and Occupational Choice Presented: Chicago IL, Society of Labor Economists Annual Meetings, May 2012 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Keyword(s): Occupational Choice; Occupational Information Network (ONET); Occupations; Skills Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Workers entering the labor market are uncertain about their skill set. Standard human capital theory assumes workers have perfect information about their skills. In this paper, I argue that skill uncertainty can explain one type of worker moves that standard human capital theory cannot: moves between jobs where they perform different kinds of tasks. I consider workers who have a multi-dimensional bundle of labor market skills and begin their careers uncertain about their skill levels. I construct a model that links learning about skills to the tasks performed in jobs: the more intensely a job uses a particular skill, the more the workers learn about their true level of that skill. The model also contains a skill accumulation motive: as workers use a skill they gain additional amounts of it. A simplified version of the model suggests that if skill uncertainty were the dominant force workers would switch between jobs that use skills in different ratios but similar total levels. On the other hand, if skill accumulation were the dominant force they would switch between jobs that use similar ratios of skills but higher total levels. Linking data on workers from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 with occupational characteristics from the US Department of Labor ONET database, I show that worker mobility across different task mixes is common and I estimate the model parameters. The current results indicate that skill uncertainty explains approximately 30% of worker mobility across different task ratios.
	Bibliography Citation Sanders, Carl. "Skill Uncertainty, Skill Accumulation, and Occupational Choice." Presented: Chicago IL, Society of Labor Economists Annual Meetings, May 2012.

4.	Speer, Jamin D.
4.	The Gender Gap in College Major: Revisiting the Role of Pre-College Factors Presented: Seattle WA, Annual Meetings of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), May 2016 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Cognitive Ability; College Major/Field of Study/Courses; Gender Differences Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Using a broader array of pre-college test scores (the ASVAB), I show that differences in college preparation can actually account for a large portion of most gender gaps in college major content, including two-thirds of the gap in science, half of the gap in humanities, and almost half of the gap in engineering. By contrast, business and education retain large gender gaps even when controlling for abilities. A smaller portion (at most 22%) of women's higher likelihood of switching out of a science or engineering major is explained by the ASVAB scores, suggesting that most ability sorting into majors occurs at the beginning of college. I show that gender gaps in test scores, particularly in science and mechanical fields, exist by the mid-teenage years and typically grow with age. While there are gender differences in middle and high school course-taking, they do not explain the increasing gender gaps in test scores.
	Bibliography Citation Speer, Jamin D. "The Gender Gap in College Major: Revisiting the Role of Pre-College Factors." Presented: Seattle WA, Annual Meetings of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), May 2016.

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