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How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental and quasi-experimental research designs have generated new insights on the importance of residential neighborhoods in childhood and adulthood. This paper summarizes the recent neighborhood effects literature and interprets the findings. Childhood neighborhoods affect long-run economic and educational outcomes in a manner consistent with exposure models of neighborhood effects. For adults, neighborhood environments matter for their health and well-being but have more ambiguous impacts on labor market outcomes. We discuss the evidence on the mechanisms behind the observed patterns and conclude by highlighting directions for future research.

Although nonexperimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Usin...

Antipoverty policies may hold promise as tools to improve health and reduce mortality rates among low-income Americans. We examined the health effects of the New York City Paycheck Plus randomized controlled trial. Paycheck Plus tests the impact of a potential fourfold increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income Americans without dependent children. Starting in 2015, Paycheck Plus offered 5,968 study participants a credit of up to $2,000 at tax time (treatment) or the standard credit of about $500 (control). Health-related quality of life and other outcomes for a representative subset of these participants (n = 3,289) were compared to those of a control group thirty-two months after randomization. The intervention had a modest positive effect on employment and earnings, particularly among women. It had no effect on health-related quality of life for the overall sample, but women realized significant improvements.

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backwards and forwards. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers. Increased educational wage differentials explain 75 percent of the rise of U.S. wage inequality from 1980 to 2000 as compared to 38 percent for 2000 to 2017.

Antipoverty policies have the potential to improve mental health. We conducted a randomized trial (Paycheck Plus Health Study Randomized Controlled Trial, New York, New York) to investigate whether a 4-fold increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income Americans without dependent children would reduce psychological distress relative to the current federal credit. Between 2013 and 2014, a total of 5,968 participants were recruited; 2,997 were randomly assigned to the treatment group and 2,971 were assigned to the control group. Survey data were collected 32 months postrandomization (n = 4,749). Eligibility for the program increased employment by 1.9 percentage points and after-bonus earnings by 6% ($635/year), on average, over the 3 years of the study. Treatment was associated with a marginally statistically significant decline in psychological distress, as measured by the 6-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, relative to the control group (score change = −0.30 points, 95% confidence interval (CI): −0.63, 0.03; P = 0.072). Women in the treated group experienced a half-point reduction in psychological distress (score change = −0.55 points, 95% CI: −0.97, −0.13; P = 0.032), and noncustodial parents had a 1.36-point reduction (95% CI: −2.24, −0.49; P = 0.011). Expansion of a large antipoverty program to individuals without dependent children reduced psychological distress for women and noncustodial parents—the groups that benefitted the most in terms of increased after-bonus earnings.

Although non-experimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this paper compares experimental and non-experimental estimates from MTO and a parallel analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Striking similarities were found between non-experimental estimates based on MTO and PSID. No clear evidence was found that different estimates are related to duration of adult exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods, non-linear effects of neighborhood conditions, magnitude of the change in neighborhood context, frequency of moves, treatment effect heterogeneity, or measurement, although uncertainty bands around our estimates were sometimes large. One other possibility is that MTO-induced moves might have been unusually disruptive, but results are inconsistent for that hypothesis. Taken together, the findings suggest that selection bias might account for evidence of neighborhood effects on adult economic outcomes in non-experimental studies.

This paper examines the evidence from randomized evaluations of sector-focused training programs that target low-wage workers and combine upfront screening, occupational and soft skills training, and wraparound services. The programs generate substantial and persistent earnings gains (11 to 40 percent) following training completion. Theoretical mechanisms for program impacts are explored for the WorkAdvance demonstration. Earnings gains are generated by getting participants into higher-wage jobs in higher-earning industries and occupations not just by raising employment. Training in transferable and certifiable skills (likely under-provided from poaching concerns) and reductions of employment barriers to high-wage sectors for non-traditional workers appear to play key roles. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Pre-Analysis Plans (PAPs) for randomized evaluations are becoming increasingly common in Economics, but their definition remains unclear and their practical applications therefore vary widely. Based on our collective experiences as researchers and editors, we articulate a set of principles for the ex-ante scope and ex-post use of PAPs. We argue that the key benefits of a PAP can usually be realized by completing the registration fields in the AEA RCT Registry. Specific cases where more detail may be warranted include when subgroup analysis is expected to be particularly important, or a party to the study has a vested interest. However, a strong norm for more detailed pre-specification can be detrimental to knowledge creation when implementing field experiments in the real world. An ex-post requirement of strict adherence to pre-specified plans, or the discounting of non-pre-specified work, may mean that some experiments do not take place, or that interesting observations and new theories are not explored and reported. Rather, we recommend that the final research paper be written and judged as a distinct object from the “results of the PAP”; to emphasize this distinction, researchers could consider producing a short, publicly available report (the “populated PAP”) that populates the PAP to the extent possible and briefly discusses any barriers to doing so. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, the authors conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. Their findings point to a rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the US economy from 1995 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7% in February 2005 to possibly as high as 15.8% in late 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or TaskRabbit, accounted for 0.5% of all workers in 2015. Of the workers selling goods or services directly to customers, approximately twice as many reported finding customers through off-line intermediaries than through online intermediaries.

The share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements has increased substantially in recent decades. Micro longitudinal analyses show that unemployed workers are much more likely to transition into alternative work arrangements than other workers. Macro time-series evidence shows that weak labor market conditions lead to an increase in non-traditional work. But the estimated magnitudes imply that the Great Recession and high unemployment in the 2000s can account for only a modest part of the rise in alternative work. Secular factors associated with rising inequality and technological changes making it easier to contract out work appear to be the driving forces.

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The upsurge in NBER publications was even greater. Using EconLit codes from 1990 to 2019, the use of human capital among NBER books increased from 5% to 25%, whereas all economics books changed from 3% to 6%. For NBER working papers, 3% referenced human capital around 1990, but 10% have more recently. The figures for all economics articles are 4% and 6%. The NBER played an outsized role in the rise of the concept of human capital mainly because of the emphasis on empiricism at the NBER. We explore how the NBER was an incubator of human capital research and the ways human capital theory brought the NBER into the modern era of economics.

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An alternative explanation is that they do not move to high-opportunity areas because of barriers that prevent them from making such moves. We test between these two explanations using a randomized controlled trial with housing voucher recipients in Seattle and King County. We provided services to reduce barriers to moving to high-upward-mobility neighborhoods: customized search assistance, landlord engagement, and short-term financial assistance. Unlike many previous housing mobility programs, families using vouchers were not required to move to a high-opportunity neighborhood to receive a voucher. The intervention increased the fraction of families who moved to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% in the control group to 53% in the treatment group. Families induced to move to higher opportunity areas by the treatment do not make sacrifices on other aspects of neighborhood quality, tend to stay in their new neighborhoods when their leases come up for renewal, and report higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction after moving. These findings imply that most low-income families do not have a strong preference to stay in low-opportunity areas; instead, barriers in the housing search process are a central driver of residential segregation by income. Interviews with families reveal that the capacity to address each family's needs in a specific manner — from emotional support to brokering with landlords to customized financial assistance — was critical to the program's success. Using quasi-experimental analyses and comparisons to other studies, we show that more standardized policies — increasing voucher payment standards in high-opportunity areas or informational interventions — have much smaller impacts. We conclude that redesigning affordable housing policies to provide customized assistance in housing search could reduce residential segregation and increase upward mobility substantially.

Pharmacy today is a highly remunerated female-majority profession with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion. Using extensive surveys of pharmacists, as well as the US Census, American Community Surveys, and Current Population Surveys, we explore the gender earnings gap, penalty to part-time work, demographics of pharmacists relative to other college graduates, and evolution of the profession during the last half-century. Technological changes increasing substitutability among pharmacists, growth of pharmacy employment in retail chains and hospitals, and related decline of independent pharmacies reduced the penalty to part-time work and contribute to the narrow gender earnings gap in pharmacy.

This article discusses trends in alternative work arrangements in the United States using data from the Contingent Worker Survey (CWS) supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 1995 to 2017, the 2015 RAND-Princeton Contingent Work Survey, and administrative tax data from the Internal Revenue Service for 2000 to 2016. Based on cyclically adjusted comparisons of the CPS CWS, measures using self-respondents in the CPS CWS, and measures of self-employment and 1099 workers from administrative tax data, we conclude that there has likely been a modest upward trend in the share of the U.S. workforce in alternative work arrangements during the 2000s. We also present evidence from Amazon Mechanical Turk suggesting that the basic monthly CPS question on multiple job holding misses many instances of multiple job holding.

Roland Fryer has emerged during the last decade as a leading scholar of the US racial divide and as a major figure in the evaluation of education policies to narrow the racial achievement gap and improve the prospects of low-income and minority children. He has been bold and fearless in his willingness to apply rigorous economic theory, to collect new data, and to develop and implement appropriate and compelling empirical strategies (including randomized field experiments) to assess any serious hypothesis that might shed light on racial inequality and that may provide policy tools to improve the academic achievement and long-run outcomes of disadvantaged children. Fryer’s work is marked by a creative and entrepreneurial edge that has allowed him to carry out large-scale evaluations and interventions in the context of large school districts like New York, Chicago, Houston, and Dallas, often in the face of political opposition and bureaucratic inertia. His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the barriers to increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded. Fryer’s research output related to racial inequality, the US racial achievement gap, and the design and evaluation of educational policies make him a worthy recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal. He was born in Daytona Beach, Florida. His tumultuous childhood and youth experiences in Florida and Texas have been well-documented in a profile in the New York Times Magazine (Dubner 2005). Roland went on to earn his BA from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1998 and his PhD in economics from Pennsylvania State

We explore the extent to which composition, duration dependence, and labor force non-participation can account for the sharp increase in the incidence of long-term unemployment (LTU) during the Great Recession. We first show that compositional shifts in demographics, occupation, industry, region, and the reason for unemployment jointly account for very little of the observed increase in LTU. Next, using panel data from the Current Population Survey for 2002-2007, we calibrate a matching model that allows for duration dependence in the exit rate from unemployment and for transitions between employment (E), unemployment (U), and non-participation (N). We model the job-finding rates for the unemployed and non-participants, and we use observed vacancy rates and the transition rates from E-to-U, E-to-N, N-to-U, and U-to-N as the exogenous "forcing variables'' of the model. The calibrated model can account for almost all of the increase in the incidence of LTU and much of the observed outward shift in the Beveridge curve between 2008 and 2013. Both negative duration dependence in the job-finding rate for the unemployed and transitions to and from non-participation contribute significantly to the ability of the model to match the data after 2008.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE vs. Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10-15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.

Alan Krueger, the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University, passed away on 16 March at the age of 58. He was among the most innovative and influential economists of the past four decades. Alan's scholarship revealed the operation of real-world labor markets, the impacts of the minimum wage and school resources, the measurement of subjective well-being, and the plight of the unemployed. He pushed the field of economics toward a more evidence-based and scientific approach to research and policy analysis. Alan Krueger was born on 17 September 1960 and grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. After graduating from Cornell University in 1983 and pursuing graduate studies in economics at Harvard University, he earned his Ph.D. in 1987. He became an assistant professor that year in the Department of Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, earned tenure in 1992, and remained at Princeton for the rest of his career, where he served as a caring mentor to many generations of students, young scholars, and future policy-makers. From 1994 to 1995, he served as the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Later, he was an assistant secretary of the Treasury from 2009 to 2010 and then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2013, both under President Barack Obama. Alan gained prominence as a scholar in the early 1990s as a leader in the “credibility revolution” in empirical economics. His pioneering work used natural experiments to provide compelling estimates of the returns to educational investments and the impact of minimum wages. His pathbreaking work with economist Joshua Angrist used quasi-experimental variation in the date of birth combined with the operation of compulsory schooling laws to estimate a large positive causal impact of schooling on earnings, even for students on the margin of dropping out of school. Alan and economist David Card harnessed historical changes in state education resources across birth cohorts to provide convincing estimates of the substantial returns from increases in school resources on students' long-run economic outcomes. Alan used the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) class-size reduction experiment to illustrate the advantage of randomized controlled trials for policy evaluation. Alan and I met in 1986 when I was a new assistant professor and Alan was completing his Ph.D. in the Harvard Economics Department. Alan quickly became one of my closest colleagues, collaborators, and intellectual confidantes and remained so for the next 33 years. My fondest memories of Alan come from our intense, yet entertaining, daily phone calls when we were both young scholars. Our conversations, ranging from research projects to professional gossip, always displayed his quick wit, laser focus on the most important questions, and infectious enthusiasm for new ideas. A multitasker, he would later regale visitors with a history of his Treasury office while devising new approaches to estimate the effect of tax credits. When we both gave talks at the National Governors Association meeting in Santa Fe this past summer, it was Alan who showed me the best swag and introduced me to the most engaging governors and staffers. He was involved in everything and connected to everybody. ![Figure][1] PHOTO: SAMEER A. KHAN/FOTOBUDDY My work with Alan exploited the federal minimum wage increase of 1991 to estimate its impact on employment and wages by collecting survey data on fast-food restaurants in a large, low-wage state (Texas). We found (contrary to our expectations and the prevailing wisdom) that employment increased more in the lower-wage restaurants directly affected by the higher minimum wage as compared with higher-wage restaurants that were not constrained. Alan's classic study on the minimum wage with David Card, comparing fast-food restaurants in New Jersey before and after the state increased its minimum wage in 1992 with those just across the border in Pennsylvania, also found no adverse employment impact. Card and Krueger expanded the scope of this research in their 1995 book Myth and Measurement to examine the impact of minimum wages on income distribution and to reassess models of the labor market. His “can do” attitude enabled Alan to charge ahead with important research even if it meant collecting data from nonstandard sources. He founded the Princeton Survey Research Center in 1992 to facilitate such efforts. Alan's findings were often unconventional, such as his demonstration that poverty was unlikely to be a major cause of terrorism, that attending a more elite university did not raise earnings above those earned after attending a lesser institution for most, and that economic growth eventually improves the environment. He built the new field of “Rockonomics” by showing how economic analysis can illuminate concert ticket pricing and musician incomes. Alan helped develop innovative survey methods to improve the measurement of happiness. His research highlighted the psychological cost of searching for a job as well as the high incidence of pain among the long-term jobless. Alan's recent work documented the rise of the online gig economy and its complications for labor market regulations. Alan's rigorous research methods were reminiscent of the best investigative journalism. His work with economist Alexandre Mas linked traffic fatalities to defective tires produced after a labor dispute. With economist Orley Ashenfelter, he used actual franchise contracts to provide smoking-gun evidence of nonpoaching agreements limiting worker mobility, research that quickly led to probes by multiple state attorneys general. Because of Alan Krueger, the field of economics has become more scientific through the adoption of credible empirical methods that identify causal relationships and more humanistic through innovative survey methods that improve the measurement of well-being, pain, and work arrangements. He combined intellectual curiosity, a passion for using social science to improve lives, and an ability to uncover evidence from unexpected sources. Alan Krueger's work likely has benefited millions of workers from stronger evidence to guide public policy. Most important, he was a devoted husband and father who leaves behind his wife Lisa and his children Benjamin and Sydney. [1]: pending:yes

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term outcomes. Higher-quality neighborhoods improve family safety, adult subjective well-being and health, and girls' mental health. But they have no detectable impact on youth human capital, labor market outcomes, or risky behaviors. In contrast, higher-quality schools can improve children's academic achievement and can have longer-term positive impacts of increasing educational attainment and earnings and reducing incarceration and teen pregnancy.

In this paper, we discuss an explanation for the fall in share of labour in GDP based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms with high profit margins and a low share of labor in firm value-added and sales. As the importance of superstar firms increases, the aggregate labour share will fall. This hypothesis suggeststhat sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms and that industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labour share. We find support for these predictions aggregating up micro-data from the US Census 1982-2012.

For-profit, or proprietary, colleges are the fastest-growing postsecondary schools in the nation, enrolling a disproportionately high share of disadvantaged and minority students and those ill-prepared for college. Because these schools, many of them big national chains, derive most of their revenue from taxpayer-funded student financial aid, they are of interest to policy makers not only for the role they play in the higher education spectrum but also for the value they provide their students. In this article, David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz look at the students who attend for-profits, the reasons they choose these schools, and student outcomes on a number of broad measures and draw several conclusions. First, the authors write, the evidence shows that public community colleges may provide an equal or better education at lower cost than for-profits. But budget pressures mean that community colleges and other nonselective public institutions may not be able to meet the demand for higher education. Some students unable to get into desired courses and programs at public institutions may face only two alternatives: attendance at a for-profit or no postsecondary education at all. Second, for-profits appear to be at their best with well-defined programs of short duration that prepare students for a specific occupation. But for-profit completion rates, default rates, and labor market outcomes for students seeking associate’s or higher degrees compare unfavorably with those of public postsecondary institutions. In principle, taxpayer investment in student aid should be accompanied by scrutiny concerning whether students complete their course of study and subsequently earn enough to justify the investment and pay back their student loans. Designing appropriate regulations to help students navigate the market for higher education has proven to be a challenge because of the great variation in student goals and types of programs. Ensuring that potential students have complete and objective information about the costs and expected benefits of for-profit programs could improve postsecondary education opportunities for disadvantaged students and counter aggressive and potentially misleading recruitment practices at for-profit colleges, the authors write.

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, we conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. The findings point to a significant rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.7 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015. The percentage of workers hired out through contract companies showed the largest rise, increasing from 1.4 percent in 2005 to 3.1 percent in 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or Task Rabbit, accounted for 0.5 percent of all workers in 2015. About twice as many workers selling goods or services directly to customers reported finding customers through offline intermediaries than through online intermediaries.

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation. Cohort effects, in turn, are mainly a function of educational advances and greater prior work experience. But labor force participation rates of the most recent cohorts in their forties are less than those for previous cohorts. It would appear that employment at older ages could stagnate or even decrease. But several other factors will be operating in an opposing direction leading us to conclude that women are likely to continue to work even longer.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Location, Location, Location It seems obvious that a person's residential neighborhood will influence their sense of well-being, but it has been difficult to nail down cause and effect. Ludwig et al. (p. 1505 ; see the Perspective by Sampson ) describe the analysis, 10 to 15 years onward, of a large-scale social experiment carried out in five U.S. cities in the mid 1990s. Several thousand residents of poor neighborhoods were given housing vouchers that could only be used if they moved into much less poor neighborhoods. In comparison to a similar group of individuals who did not move, those who did experienced substantial improvement in their subjective well-being.

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of enrollments in non-degree granting postsecondary schools. We describe the schools, students, and programs in the for-profit higher education sector, its phenomenal recent growth, and its relationship to the federal and state governments. Using the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey we assess outcomes of a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. We find that relative to these other institutions, for-profits educate a larger fraction of minority, disadvantaged, and older students, and they have greater success at retaining students in their first year and getting them to complete short programs at the certificate and associate degree levels. But we also find that for-profit students end up with higher unemployment and "idleness" rates and lower earnings six years after entering programs than do comparable students from other schools, and that they have far greater student debt burdens and default rates on their student loans.

The sharp rise in U.S. wage inequality and educational wage differentials in the 1980s motivated this research examining the extent to which the patterns of changes in the wage structure differed in the U.S. private and public sectors. The project represented a marriage and natural outgrowth of three distinctive but related research agendas of the authors: (1) work on understanding U.S. wage structure and wage inequality changes (Katz); (2) studies of the level of the public–private wage differential and the use of data on quits and job queues (applications) to measure labor market rents for public sector employees (Krueger); (3) burgeoning research in the 1980s on testing theories of industry, firm, and establishment wage differentials (Katz and Krueger). The use of large-scale micro household Current Population Survey samples as well micro administrative personnel data on federal government employees foreshadowed more recent developments in computing power and data accessibility allowing the use of rich individual-level administrative data sets to explore key labor market issues. The analysis went beyond examining public sector compensation responses to changes in skill differentials to also explore how compensation in different levels of government (federal, state, and local) responded to variation in local

Economists and other social scientists have long studied intergenerational income mobility, but consistent data linking adult incomes of children and their parents at similar ages over many generations have been unavailable, which thwarted attempts to study long-term trends. Chetty et al. 's study in this issue of Science ( 1 ) is therefore a tour de force for producing historically comparable estimates of absolute income mobility—the fraction of individuals in a birth cohort who earn, at age 30, more than their parents did at roughly the same age—over the post–World War II period. Their striking conclusion is that there has been a large decline in the rate of upward mobility across successive U.S. birth cohorts, from 92% of children born in 1940 earning more than their parents to only half of children born in 1984. Although Chetty et al. find that the slowdown in Gross Domestic Product growth has played a role, they conclude that faster economic growth is insufficient to restore mobility to its immediate postwar level in light of increased income inequality—a critical insight for policy and research.

The question of whether neighborhood environment contributes directly to the development of obesity and diabetes remains unresolved. The study reported on here uses data from a social experiment to assess the association of randomly assigned variation in neighborhood conditions with obesity and diabetes.From 1994 through 1998, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) randomly assigned 4498 women with children living in public housing in high-poverty urban census tracts (in which ≥40% of residents had incomes below the federal poverty threshold) to one of three groups: 1788 were assigned to receive housing vouchers, which were redeemable only if they moved to a low-poverty census tract (where10% of residents were poor), and counseling on moving; 1312 were assigned to receive unrestricted, traditional vouchers, with no special counseling on moving; and 1398 were assigned to a control group that was offered neither of these opportunities. From 2008 through 2010, as part of a long-term follow-up survey, we measured data indicating health outcomes, including height, weight, and level of glycated hemoglobin (HbA(1c)).As part of our long-term survey, we obtained data on body-mass index (BMI, the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) for 84.2% of participants and data on glycated hemoglobin level for 71.3% of participants. Response rates were similar across randomized groups. The prevalences of a BMI of 35 or more, a BMI of 40 or more, and a glycated hemoglobin level of 6.5% or more were lower in the group receiving the low-poverty vouchers than in the control group, with an absolute difference of 4.61 percentage points (95% confidence interval [CI], -8.54 to -0.69), 3.38 percentage points (95% CI, -6.39 to -0.36), and 4.31 percentage points (95% CI, -7.82 to -0.80), respectively. The differences between the group receiving traditional vouchers and the control group were not significant.The opportunity to move from a neighborhood with a high level of poverty to one with a lower level of poverty was associated with modest but potentially important reductions in the prevalence of extreme obesity and diabetes. The mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear but warrant further investigation, given their potential to guide the design of community-level interventions intended to improve health. (Funded by HUD and others.).

The authors study the pecuniary penalties for family-related amenities in the workplace (e.g., job interruptions, short hours, part-time work, and flexibility during the workday), how women have responded to them, and how the penalties have changed over time. The pecuniary penalties to behaviors that are beneficial to family appear to have decreased in many professions. Self-employment has declined in many of the high-end professions (e.g., pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, law, medicine, and veterinary medicine) where it was costly in terms of workplace flexibility. The authors conclude that many professions have experienced an increase in workplace flexibility, driven often by exogenous factors (e.g., increased scale of operations and shifts to corporate ownership of business) but also endogenously because of an increased number of women. Workplace flexibility in some positions, notably in the business and financial sectors, has lagged.

The careers of MBAs from a top US business school are studied to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical earnings at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points a decade after MBA completion. Three proximate factors account for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: differences in training prior to MBA graduation, differences in career interruptions, and differences in weekly hours. The greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs are largely associated with motherhood. (JEL J16, J22, J31, J44)