Joseph G Altonji
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 993209 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joseph G Altonji |
| NOMBRES | Joseph G |
| APELLIDO | Altonji |
| FIRMA | ALTONJI J G |
| AFILIACIONES | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6010-0183 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 586 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Earnings, Marriage, and the Variance of Family Income by Age, Gender, and Cohort
For birth cohorts 1935–44, 1945–62, and 1964–74, we estimate the contribution of education; permanent heterogeneity in wage rates, employment, and hours; labor market shocks; spouse characteristics and shocks; nonlabor income shocks; and marital histories to the age profiles of the variance of family income per adult equivalent. Education and employment heterogeneity are key sources of the rise in variance with age and across cohorts. Wage hetero…
The Labor Market Returns to Advanced Degrees
We estimate the returns to a broad set of graduate degrees. To control for heterogeneity in preferences and ability, we use fixed effects for combinations of field-specific undergraduate and graduate degrees obtained by the last time we observe an individual. Basically, we compare earnings before the graduate degree to earnings after it. Using National Science Foundation data, we find large differences across graduate fields in earnings effects. …
The Effects of Immigration on the Labor Market Outcomes of Less-skilled Natives
This chapter presents a simple theoretical model that describes the effects of immigration on the domestic labor market. It addresses the question of whether immigrants and natives within the same city compete in the same labor market. The chapter provides a regression analysis of the relation between immigrant shares and employment outcomes of natives across major cities. The results vary somewhat between the cross-sectional and first-difference…
Cashier or Consultant? Entry Labor Market Conditions, Field of Study, and Career Success
We measure impacts of entry conditions on labor market outcomes for the US college graduating classes of 1974–2011. A large recession reduces initial earnings by 10%, through full-time work and wages, with small persistent impacts on wages. Those in high-paying majors experience smaller impacts on most labor market outcomes, widening earnings inequality across majors. In the Great Recession, early earnings losses are much larger than predicted gi…
Estimating the Cream Skimming Effect of School Choice
We derive a formula to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. The “cream skimming” effect is increasing in the degree of heterogeneity within schools, the school choice take-up rate of strong students relative to weak students, and the dependence of school outcomes on student body quality. We use the formula to investigate the cream skimming effect of hypo…
Group-Average Observables as Controls for Sorting on Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects
We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics that affect the outcome. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially absorbs all the across-group variation in unobservable individual characteristics. We use this insight to bound the treatment effect variance of school system…
Heterogeneity in Human Capital Investments
Motivated by the large differences in labor market outcomes across college majors, we survey the literature on the demand for and return to high school and postsecondary education by field of study. We combine elements from several papers to provide a dynamic model of education and occupation choice that stresses the roles of the specificity of human capital and uncertainty about preferences, ability, education outcomes, and labor market returns.…
Work Hours, Wages, and Vacation Leave
Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors provide a set of facts about vacation leave. They show that on average, vacation time taken rises one-to-one with paid vacation; annual hours worked fall by about one full-time week with every week of paid vacation; the amount by which vacation time taken exceeds time paid is highest for women, union members, and government workers; paid vacation weeks are positively associated with hourly wag…
An Evaluation of Instrumental Variable Strategies for Estimating the Effects of Catholic Schooling
Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental variables. We find that none of the candidate instruments is a useful source of identification in currently available data sets. We also investigate the role…
Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables
In this paper we measure the effect of Catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores. Because we do not have a good instrumental variable for Catholic school attendance, we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables. We also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bi…
Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority? A Reassessment
The authors provide new estimates of the return to job seniority using a dataset similar to that employed in Joseph Altonji and Robert Shakotko, "Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?" Review of Economic Studies (1987) and Robert Topel, "Specific Capital, Mobility, and Wages," Journal of Political Economy (1991). They consider the strengths and weaknesses of these studies' treatment of economy-wide trends, their dating conventions for tenure and wage…
Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination
We show that if firms statistically discriminate among young workers on the basis of easily observable characteristics such as education, then as firms learn about productivity, the coefficients on the easily observed variables should fall, and the coefficients on hard-to-observe correlates of productivity should rise. We find support for this proposition using NLSY79 data on education, the AFQT test, father's education, and wages for young men a…
Chapter 48 Race and gender in the labor market
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
Small-Sample Bias in GMM Estimation of Covariance Structures
We examine the small-sample properties of the generalized method of moments estimator applied to models of covariance structures, in which case it is commonly known as the optimal minimum distance (OMD) estimator. We find that OMD is almost always biased downward in absolute value. The bias arises because sampling errors in the second moments are correlated with sampling errors in the weighting matrix used by OMD. Furthermore, OMD is usually domi…
Using Siblings to Estimate the Effect of School Quality on Wages
In this paper we use the variance across siblings in school characteristics to estimate the effects of school inputs on wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. We find that teacher's salary, expenditures per pupil, and a composite index of school quality indicators have a substantial positive effect on the wages of high school graduates
The Effects of Family Characteristics on the Return to Education
In this paper, the authors examine the role of parental education in the human capital production function by estimating the effects of parental education on the education profile of wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. The authors obtained mixed evidence on whether parental education raises the return to educat…
Worker Characteristics, Job Characteristics, and the Receipt of On-the-Job Training
The authors examine the relationship between the receipt of employer-provided training and the characteristics of workers and jobs using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. They find that the intensity of training and the duration of training were negatively related; the incidence of training was slightly higher among women than among men, but the amount of trainin…
Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?
Many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority (tenure) on wages. This paper re-examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage. We use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure. The variation in tenure over the job is u…
Intertemporal Substitution in Labor Supply
The sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics, the analysis of social security and pensions, and the study of life-cycle patterns of work. This paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature. The first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the …
Wage Movements and the Labour Market Equilibrium Hypothesis
The view that aggregate monetary and fiscal policies cannot affect unemployment in long run is now accepted by both academic economists and public officials.' Some academics were convinced early on that demand management policies must have a neutral effect on real activity on grounds that money illusion could not persist indefinitely. Other academics and many public officials were finally convinced when predictions that continued reflationary pol…
Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables
In this paper we measure the effect of Catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores. Because we do not have a good instrumental variable for Catholic school attendance, we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables. We also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bi…
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
Intertemporal Substitution in Labor Supply
The sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics, the analysis of social security and pensions, and the study of life-cycle patterns of work. This paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature. The first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the …
Worker Characteristics, Job Characteristics, and the Receipt of On-the-Job Training
The authors examine the relationship between the receipt of employer-provided training and the characteristics of workers and jobs using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. They find that the intensity of training and the duration of training were negatively related; the incidence of training was slightly higher among women than among men, but the amount of trainin…
Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority? A Reassessment
The authors provide new estimates of the return to job seniority using a dataset similar to that employed in Joseph Altonji and Robert Shakotko, "Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?" Review of Economic Studies (1987) and Robert Topel, "Specific Capital, Mobility, and Wages," Journal of Political Economy (1991). They consider the strengths and weaknesses of these studies' treatment of economy-wide trends, their dating conventions for tenure and wage…
Estimating the Cream Skimming Effect of School Choice
We derive a formula to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. The “cream skimming” effect is increasing in the degree of heterogeneity within schools, the school choice take-up rate of strong students relative to weak students, and the dependence of school outcomes on student body quality. We use the formula to investigate the cream skimming effect of hypo…
Wage Movements and the Labour Market Equilibrium Hypothesis
The view that aggregate monetary and fiscal policies cannot affect unemployment in long run is now accepted by both academic economists and public officials.' Some academics were convinced early on that demand management policies must have a neutral effect on real activity on grounds that money illusion could not persist indefinitely. Other academics and many public officials were finally convinced when predictions that continued reflationary pol…
Wage Movements and the Labour Market Equilibrium Hypothesis
The view that aggregate monetary and fiscal policies cannot affect unemployment in long run is now accepted by both academic economists and public officials.' Some academics were convinced early on that demand management policies must have a neutral effect on real activity on grounds that money illusion could not persist indefinitely. Other academics and many public officials were finally convinced when predictions that continued reflationary pol…
Intertemporal Substitution in Labor Supply
The sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics, the analysis of social security and pensions, and the study of life-cycle patterns of work. This paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature. The first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the …
Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?
Many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority (tenure) on wages. This paper re-examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage. We use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure. The variation in tenure over the job is u…
Worker Characteristics, Job Characteristics, and the Receipt of On-the-Job Training
The authors examine the relationship between the receipt of employer-provided training and the characteristics of workers and jobs using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. They find that the intensity of training and the duration of training were negatively related; the incidence of training was slightly higher among women than among men, but the amount of trainin…
Small-Sample Bias in GMM Estimation of Covariance Structures
We examine the small-sample properties of the generalized method of moments estimator applied to models of covariance structures, in which case it is commonly known as the optimal minimum distance (OMD) estimator. We find that OMD is almost always biased downward in absolute value. The bias arises because sampling errors in the second moments are correlated with sampling errors in the weighting matrix used by OMD. Furthermore, OMD is usually domi…
Using Siblings to Estimate the Effect of School Quality on Wages
In this paper we use the variance across siblings in school characteristics to estimate the effects of school inputs on wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. We find that teacher's salary, expenditures per pupil, and a composite index of school quality indicators have a substantial positive effect on the wages of high school graduates
The Effects of Family Characteristics on the Return to Education
In this paper, the authors examine the role of parental education in the human capital production function by estimating the effects of parental education on the education profile of wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. The authors obtained mixed evidence on whether parental education raises the return to educat…
Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers
This paper uses Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one-dollar reduction in that child's income results in a one-dollar increase in the parents' transfer to the child. The authors find that redist…
Chapter 48 Race and gender in the labor market
Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination
We show that if firms statistically discriminate among young workers on the basis of easily observable characteristics such as education, then as firms learn about productivity, the coefficients on the easily observed variables should fall, and the coefficients on hard-to-observe correlates of productivity should rise. We find support for this proposition using NLSY79 data on education, the AFQT test, father's education, and wages for young men a…
An Evaluation of Instrumental Variable Strategies for Estimating the Effects of Catholic Schooling
Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental variables. We find that none of the candidate instruments is a useful source of identification in currently available data sets. We also investigate the role…
Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables
In this paper we measure the effect of Catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores. Because we do not have a good instrumental variable for Catholic school attendance, we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables. We also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bi…
Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority? A Reassessment
The authors provide new estimates of the return to job seniority using a dataset similar to that employed in Joseph Altonji and Robert Shakotko, "Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?" Review of Economic Studies (1987) and Robert Topel, "Specific Capital, Mobility, and Wages," Journal of Political Economy (1991). They consider the strengths and weaknesses of these studies' treatment of economy-wide trends, their dating conventions for tenure and wage…
Work Hours, Wages, and Vacation Leave
Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors provide a set of facts about vacation leave. They show that on average, vacation time taken rises one-to-one with paid vacation; annual hours worked fall by about one full-time week with every week of paid vacation; the amount by which vacation time taken exceeds time paid is highest for women, union members, and government workers; paid vacation weeks are positively associated with hourly wag…
Heterogeneity in Human Capital Investments
Motivated by the large differences in labor market outcomes across college majors, we survey the literature on the demand for and return to high school and postsecondary education by field of study. We combine elements from several papers to provide a dynamic model of education and occupation choice that stresses the roles of the specificity of human capital and uncertainty about preferences, ability, education outcomes, and labor market returns.…
Group-Average Observables as Controls for Sorting on Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects
We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics that affect the outcome. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially absorbs all the across-group variation in unobservable individual characteristics. We use this insight to bound the treatment effect variance of school system…
Estimating the Cream Skimming Effect of School Choice
We derive a formula to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. The “cream skimming” effect is increasing in the degree of heterogeneity within schools, the school choice take-up rate of strong students relative to weak students, and the dependence of school outcomes on student body quality. We use the formula to investigate the cream skimming effect of hypo…
Cashier or Consultant? Entry Labor Market Conditions, Field of Study, and Career Success
We measure impacts of entry conditions on labor market outcomes for the US college graduating classes of 1974–2011. A large recession reduces initial earnings by 10%, through full-time work and wages, with small persistent impacts on wages. Those in high-paying majors experience smaller impacts on most labor market outcomes, widening earnings inequality across majors. In the Great Recession, early earnings losses are much larger than predicted gi…
The Effects of Immigration on the Labor Market Outcomes of Less-skilled Natives
This chapter presents a simple theoretical model that describes the effects of immigration on the domestic labor market. It addresses the question of whether immigrants and natives within the same city compete in the same labor market. The chapter provides a regression analysis of the relation between immigrant shares and employment outcomes of natives across major cities. The results vary somewhat between the cross-sectional and first-difference…
The Labor Market Returns to Advanced Degrees
We estimate the returns to a broad set of graduate degrees. To control for heterogeneity in preferences and ability, we use fixed effects for combinations of field-specific undergraduate and graduate degrees obtained by the last time we observe an individual. Basically, we compare earnings before the graduate degree to earnings after it. Using National Science Foundation data, we find large differences across graduate fields in earnings effects. …
Earnings, Marriage, and the Variance of Family Income by Age, Gender, and Cohort
For birth cohorts 1935–44, 1945–62, and 1964–74, we estimate the contribution of education; permanent heterogeneity in wage rates, employment, and hours; labor market shocks; spouse characteristics and shocks; nonlabor income shocks; and marital histories to the age profiles of the variance of family income per adult equivalent. Education and employment heterogeneity are key sources of the rise in variance with age and across cohorts. Wage hetero…
Economics (19 obras) · Labour economics (12 obras) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (11 obras) · Demographic economics (10 obras) · Econometrics (10 obras) · Mathematics (8 obras) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (6 obras) · Psychology (6 obras) · School Choice and Performance (6 obras) · Wage (6 obras)