Kevin Lang
Biographic Data
| ID | 3605136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Lang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Lang |
| SIGNATURE | LANG K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8497-1706 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Do Elite Universities Overpay Their Faculty
No. Elite institutions offer high salaries because they hire the most valued faculty. Moreover, in contrast to the broader labor market, faculty are equally likely to move up and down the prestige ladder, and they increase their salary either way. We speculate that these facts reflect the visible nature of faculty productivity and the sporadic nature of academic job openings
How Credible Is the Credibility Revolution
Economists analyzing a well-conducted randomized controlled trial or natural experiment and finding a statistically significant effect conclude that the null of no effect is unlikely to be true. But how frequently is this conclusion warranted? The answer depends on the proportion of tested nulls that are true and the test's power. I model the distribution of t-statistics in leading economics journals. Using my preferred model, 65% of narrowly rej…
Borrowing in an Illegal Market
Using over 11,000 unlicensed loans to over 1,000 borrowers in Singapore, we provide basic information about an understudied market: illegal moneylending. Borrowers and lenders interact frequently and rely primarily on relational contracts to enforce their agreements. Borrowers have high discount rates, often have gambling and/or substance abuse problems, and often repay late. While lenders sometimes resort to nonfinancial punishments, the primary…
The Boss is Watching
African Americans face shorter employment durations than similar Whites. We hypothesise that employers discriminate in acquiring or acting on ability-relevant information. In our model, monitoring Black, but not White, workers is self-sustaining. New Black hires were more likely fired by previous employers after monitoring. This reduces firms’ beliefs about ability, incentivising discriminatory monitoring. We confirm our predictions that layoffs …
Is intervention fadeout a scaling artefact
The Promise and Pitfalls of Differences-in-Differences
We use the exchange between Kearney/Levine and Jaeger/Joyce/Kaestner on 16 and Pregnant to reexamine the use of DiD as a response to the failure of nature to properly design an experiment for us. We argue that (1) any DiD paper should address why the original levels of the experimental and control groups differed, and why this would not impact trends, (2) the parallel trends argument requires a justification of the chosen functional form and that…
Race Discrimination
We review the empirical literature in economics on discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system, focusing primarily on discrimination by race. We then discuss theoretical models of taste-based discrimination, particularly models of frictional labor markets and models of statistical discrimination, including recent work on invalid statistical discrimination. We explore and evaluate the evidence for and against these theories. Alt…
Ben-Porath Meets Lazear
We provide microfoundations for dynamic skill formation with a model of investment in multiple skills, when jobs place different weights on skills. We show that credit constraints may affect investment even when workers do not exhaust their credit. Firms may invest in their workers’ skills even when there are many similar competitors. Firm and worker incentives can lead to overinvestment. Optimal skill accumulation resembles—but is not—learning b…
Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants
This article highlights a specific mechanism through which social networks help in job search. The authors characterize the strength of a network by its likelihood of providing a job offer. Using a theoretical model, they show that the difference between wages in jobs found using networks versus those found using formal channels decreases as the network becomes stronger. The authors verify this result for recent immigrants to Canada for whom a st…
The Sad Truth about Happiness Scales
Happiness is reported in ordered intervals (e.g. very, pretty, not too happy). We review and apply standard statistical results to determine when such data permit identification of two groups' relative average happiness. The necessary conditions for nonparametric identification are strong and unlikely to be ever satisfied. Standard parametric approaches cannot identify this ranking unless the variances are exactly equal. If not, ordered probit fi…
Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore
The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is a highly competitive market in which clients can search legally at negligible cost, making it ideal for testing Diamond's hypothesis regarding search and monopoly pricing. As Diamond predicts, price discrimination survives in this market. Despite an excess supply of workers, but consistent with their self‐reported attitudes and beliefs, sex workers charge whites (Bangladeshis) more (less), bas…
The Evolution of the Black-White Test Score Gap in Grades K–3
Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY), we examine how order-preserving scale transformations affect the evolution of the black-white reading test score gap from kindergarten entry through third grade. Plausible transformations rev…
The Consequences of Teenage Childbearing
Miscarriage, even if biologically random, is not socially random. Willingness to abort reduces miscarriage risk. Because abortions are favorably selected among pregnant teens, those miscarrying are less favorably selected than those giving birth or aborting but more favorably selected than those giving birth. Therefore, using miscarriage as an instrument is biased towards a benign view of teen motherhood while OLS on just those giving birth or mi…
Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market
We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential. Models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of w…
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions
Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent af…
Measurement Matters
One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacted in 2002 is that the law requires the production of an enormous amount of data, particularly from tests, which, if used properly, might help us improve education. As an economist and as someone who served 13 years on the School Committee1 in Brookline Massachusetts, until May 2009, I have been appalled by the limited ability of districts to analyze these data; I have bee…
Poverty and Discrimination
Many ideas about poverty and discrimination are nothing more than politically driven assertions unsupported by evidence. And even politically neutral studies that do try to assess evidence are often simply unreliable. In Poverty and Discrimination , economist Kevin Lang cuts through the vast literature on poverty and discrimination to determine what we actually know and how we know it. Using rigorous statistical analysis and economic thinking to …
Inference with Difference-in-Differences and Other Panel Data
We examine inference in panel data when the number of groups is small, as is typically the case for difference-in-differences estimation and when some variables are fixed within groups. In this case, standard asymptotics based on the number of groups going to infinity provide a poor approximation to the finite sample distribution. We show that in some cases the t-statistic is distributed as t and propose simple two-step estimators for these cases…
Does School Integration Generate Peer Effects? Evidence from Boston's Metco Program
The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco) is a desegregation program that sends students from Boston schools to more affluent suburbs. Metco increases the number of blacks and reduces test scores in receiving districts. School-level data for Massachusetts and micro data from a large district show no impact of Metco on the scores of white non-Metco students. But the micro estimates show some evidence of an effect on minority thi…
Property taxes and property values
Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once
Journal Article Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once? Get access Kevin Lang, Kevin Lang Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 111, Issue 473, July 2001, Pages 526–540, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0297.00649 Published: 09 October 2008
Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated
Kevin Lang, Jay Zagorsky, Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated?, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 24, Supplement 1: CERF/CSLR Conference on the Canada-US Unemployment Rate Gap / FCSE/CENV Conférence sur l'écart entre les taux de chômage au Canada et aux États-Unis (Feb., 1998), pp. S56-S71
An analysis of the nature of unemployment in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka has a significant youth unemployment problem. Past authors have viewed unemployment as particularly high among the more educated, but once we control for sex, sector and age the positive relation between education and unemployment disappears for urban youth and is significantly weakened for rural youth. Moreover even the relation among rural youth is brought into doubt when we account for unemployment duration. Typical unemployment spel…
Language and economists′ theories of discrimination
L'auteur passe en revue differents modeles economiques afin de mettre en evidence le role du langage (tel qu'il est defini dans ces modeles) dans le phenomene de discrimination raciale et sexuelle
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
The Sad Truth about Happiness Scales
Happiness is reported in ordered intervals (e.g. very, pretty, not too happy). We review and apply standard statistical results to determine when such data permit identification of two groups' relative average happiness. The necessary conditions for nonparametric identification are strong and unlikely to be ever satisfied. Standard parametric approaches cannot identify this ranking unless the variances are exactly equal. If not, ordered probit fi…
The Consequences of Teenage Childbearing
Miscarriage, even if biologically random, is not socially random. Willingness to abort reduces miscarriage risk. Because abortions are favorably selected among pregnant teens, those miscarrying are less favorably selected than those giving birth or aborting but more favorably selected than those giving birth. Therefore, using miscarriage as an instrument is biased towards a benign view of teen motherhood while OLS on just those giving birth or mi…
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
Race Discrimination
We review the empirical literature in economics on discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system, focusing primarily on discrimination by race. We then discuss theoretical models of taste-based discrimination, particularly models of frictional labor markets and models of statistical discrimination, including recent work on invalid statistical discrimination. We explore and evaluate the evidence for and against these theories. Alt…
Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants
This article highlights a specific mechanism through which social networks help in job search. The authors characterize the strength of a network by its likelihood of providing a job offer. Using a theoretical model, they show that the difference between wages in jobs found using networks versus those found using formal channels decreases as the network becomes stronger. The authors verify this result for recent immigrants to Canada for whom a st…
Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore
The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is a highly competitive market in which clients can search legally at negligible cost, making it ideal for testing Diamond's hypothesis regarding search and monopoly pricing. As Diamond predicts, price discrimination survives in this market. Despite an excess supply of workers, but consistent with their self‐reported attitudes and beliefs, sex workers charge whites (Bangladeshis) more (less), bas…
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions
Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent af…
Language and economists′ theories of discrimination
L'auteur passe en revue differents modeles economiques afin de mettre en evidence le role du langage (tel qu'il est defini dans ces modeles) dans le phenomene de discrimination raciale et sexuelle
Measurement Matters
One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacted in 2002 is that the law requires the production of an enormous amount of data, particularly from tests, which, if used properly, might help us improve education. As an economist and as someone who served 13 years on the School Committee1 in Brookline Massachusetts, until May 2009, I have been appalled by the limited ability of districts to analyze these data; I have bee…
Property taxes and property values
The Boss is Watching
African Americans face shorter employment durations than similar Whites. We hypothesise that employers discriminate in acquiring or acting on ability-relevant information. In our model, monitoring Black, but not White, workers is self-sustaining. New Black hires were more likely fired by previous employers after monitoring. This reduces firms’ beliefs about ability, incentivising discriminatory monitoring. We confirm our predictions that layoffs …
Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once
Journal Article Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once? Get access Kevin Lang, Kevin Lang Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 111, Issue 473, July 2001, Pages 526–540, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0297.00649 Published: 09 October 2008
Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated
Kevin Lang, Jay Zagorsky, Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated?, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 24, Supplement 1: CERF/CSLR Conference on the Canada-US Unemployment Rate Gap / FCSE/CENV Conférence sur l'écart entre les taux de chômage au Canada et aux États-Unis (Feb., 1998), pp. S56-S71
A Language Theory of Discrimination
Any advanced industrial society is composed of a number of speech communities with different verbal and nonverbal languages. In particular, in the United States blacks and whites and men and women have sharply differing methods of speaking and listening. This paper develops a model in which people can only work together if they "speak" the same language and in which it is costly to learn a second language. The competitive market will tend to mini…
Returns to Schooling, Implicit Discount Rates and Black-White Wage Differentials
A simple econometric model of investment in schooling is developed and estimated. The measure of individual discount rates implicit in their educational investment decisions suggests no difference between individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Differences in individual speeds of educational attainment, which do vary with background, explain most of the variation in levels of attainment that is attributable to family background
Unemployment and the structure of labor markets
vi, 253 p. : 24 cm
Neoclassical and Sociological Perspectives on Segmented Labor Markets
Neoclassical theory has been misrepresented in the segmented economy literature. Consequently, most tests of "structural" vs. "neoclassical" models are inadequate. Moreover, segmented economy theorists have concentrated on the least significant departures of segmented models from neoclassical economics. In fact, neoclassical economists have developed elements of a segmented labor market model which is similar to the segmented economy theories. We…
Labor Market Segmentation and the Union Wage Premium
Studies of the earnings of union workers have consistently shown that they earn considerably more than nonunion workers.This paper considers whether part of this observed union/nonunion differential is due to unions organizing high paying primary sector jobs.We extend our earlier work on the dual labor market in which we used an unknown regime switching regression to identify two labor market sectors --a high wage primary sector and a low wage se…
The Effect of Hours Constraints on Labor Supply Estimates
Almost all labor-supply models are estimated under the assumption that workers are free to choose their hours. However, theory, casual empiricism, and survey data suggest that many workers are not free to vary the hours within a job. Consequently, labor-supply estimates based on actual hours of work may be biased. Using Canadian data on desired hours of work, the authors find that using actual hours causes labor-supply estimates to be biased upwa…
Are all Economic Hypotheses False
The authors develop an estimator that allows them to calculate an upper bound to the fraction of unrejected null hypotheses tested in economics journal articles that are in fact true. Their point estimate is that none of the unrejected nulls in their sample is true. The authors reject the hypothesis that more than one-third are true. They consider three explanations for this finding: that all null hypotheses are mere approximations, that data-min…
Language and economists′ theories of discrimination
L'auteur passe en revue differents modeles economiques afin de mettre en evidence le role du langage (tel qu'il est defini dans ces modeles) dans le phenomene de discrimination raciale et sexuelle
An analysis of the nature of unemployment in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka has a significant youth unemployment problem. Past authors have viewed unemployment as particularly high among the more educated, but once we control for sex, sector and age the positive relation between education and unemployment disappears for urban youth and is significantly weakened for rural youth. Moreover even the relation among rural youth is brought into doubt when we account for unemployment duration. Typical unemployment spel…
Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated
Kevin Lang, Jay Zagorsky, Why Are Canadian and US Unemployment Rates So Highly Correlated?, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 24, Supplement 1: CERF/CSLR Conference on the Canada-US Unemployment Rate Gap / FCSE/CENV Conférence sur l'écart entre les taux de chômage au Canada et aux États-Unis (Feb., 1998), pp. S56-S71
Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once
Journal Article Bargaining Piecemeal Or All At Once? Get access Kevin Lang, Kevin Lang Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert W. Rosenthal Robert W. Rosenthal Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 111, Issue 473, July 2001, Pages 526–540, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0297.00649 Published: 09 October 2008
Does School Integration Generate Peer Effects? Evidence from Boston's Metco Program
The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco) is a desegregation program that sends students from Boston schools to more affluent suburbs. Metco increases the number of blacks and reduces test scores in receiving districts. School-level data for Massachusetts and micro data from a large district show no impact of Metco on the scores of white non-Metco students. But the micro estimates show some evidence of an effect on minority thi…
Property taxes and property values
Poverty and Discrimination
Many ideas about poverty and discrimination are nothing more than politically driven assertions unsupported by evidence. And even politically neutral studies that do try to assess evidence are often simply unreliable. In Poverty and Discrimination , economist Kevin Lang cuts through the vast literature on poverty and discrimination to determine what we actually know and how we know it. Using rigorous statistical analysis and economic thinking to …
Inference with Difference-in-Differences and Other Panel Data
We examine inference in panel data when the number of groups is small, as is typically the case for difference-in-differences estimation and when some variables are fixed within groups. In this case, standard asymptotics based on the number of groups going to infinity provide a poor approximation to the finite sample distribution. We show that in some cases the t-statistic is distributed as t and propose simple two-step estimators for these cases…
Measurement Matters
One of the potential strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacted in 2002 is that the law requires the production of an enormous amount of data, particularly from tests, which, if used properly, might help us improve education. As an economist and as someone who served 13 years on the School Committee1 in Brookline Massachusetts, until May 2009, I have been appalled by the limited ability of districts to analyze these data; I have bee…
Racial Discrimination in the Labor Market
We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential. Models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of w…
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions
Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent af…
The Evolution of the Black-White Test Score Gap in Grades K–3
Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY), we examine how order-preserving scale transformations affect the evolution of the black-white reading test score gap from kindergarten entry through third grade. Plausible transformations rev…
The Consequences of Teenage Childbearing
Miscarriage, even if biologically random, is not socially random. Willingness to abort reduces miscarriage risk. Because abortions are favorably selected among pregnant teens, those miscarrying are less favorably selected than those giving birth or aborting but more favorably selected than those giving birth. Therefore, using miscarriage as an instrument is biased towards a benign view of teen motherhood while OLS on just those giving birth or mi…
The Sad Truth about Happiness Scales
Happiness is reported in ordered intervals (e.g. very, pretty, not too happy). We review and apply standard statistical results to determine when such data permit identification of two groups' relative average happiness. The necessary conditions for nonparametric identification are strong and unlikely to be ever satisfied. Standard parametric approaches cannot identify this ranking unless the variances are exactly equal. If not, ordered probit fi…
Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore
The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is a highly competitive market in which clients can search legally at negligible cost, making it ideal for testing Diamond's hypothesis regarding search and monopoly pricing. As Diamond predicts, price discrimination survives in this market. Despite an excess supply of workers, but consistent with their self‐reported attitudes and beliefs, sex workers charge whites (Bangladeshis) more (less), bas…
Ben-Porath Meets Lazear
We provide microfoundations for dynamic skill formation with a model of investment in multiple skills, when jobs place different weights on skills. We show that credit constraints may affect investment even when workers do not exhaust their credit. Firms may invest in their workers’ skills even when there are many similar competitors. Firm and worker incentives can lead to overinvestment. Optimal skill accumulation resembles—but is not—learning b…
Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants
This article highlights a specific mechanism through which social networks help in job search. The authors characterize the strength of a network by its likelihood of providing a job offer. Using a theoretical model, they show that the difference between wages in jobs found using networks versus those found using formal channels decreases as the network becomes stronger. The authors verify this result for recent immigrants to Canada for whom a st…
The Promise and Pitfalls of Differences-in-Differences
We use the exchange between Kearney/Levine and Jaeger/Joyce/Kaestner on 16 and Pregnant to reexamine the use of DiD as a response to the failure of nature to properly design an experiment for us. We argue that (1) any DiD paper should address why the original levels of the experimental and control groups differed, and why this would not impact trends, (2) the parallel trends argument requires a justification of the chosen functional form and that…
Economics (21 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Labour economics (11 works) · Econometrics (10 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (9 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Demographic economics (6 works)