Research

Working Papers

Higher-Educated Workers’ Flattening Returns to Experience, 2024

On SSRN

This paper documents the labor-earning trajectories of young workers in France since the early 1990s. Wages at labor market entry increase overall, but the higher education graduates' wage growth flattens across cohorts. The paper proposes an equilibrium model of human capital accumulation over the life cycle in which a representative firm requires labor in two different occupations, routine and complex. The complex occupation allows faster human capital accumulation. Workers sort into occupations based on initial human capital and ability to learn. The model is estimated using observed wage moments and occupation sorting over thirty years. Estimation results highlight the role of the French higher education expansion of the 1990s and 2000s in causing occupational congestion, whereby the share of higher education graduates employed in routine occupations rose, flattening their wage profiles.

This project in conducted as part of a CEREQ workgroup (in French).

Late Bloomers? the Aggregate Implications of Getting Education Later in Life With Zsófia Bárány and Moshe Buchinsky, 2024

CEPR Discussion Paper, DP18579 NBER Working Paper 31874

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction – around 20% – of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the implications of this phenomenon. First, we show that these so called late bloomers have significantly contributed to the narrowing of gender and racial gaps in the college share, despite the general widening of the racial gap. Second, late bloomers are responsible for more than half of the increase in the aggregate college share from 1960 onwards. Finally, we show that the returns to having a college degree vary depending on the age at graduation. Ignoring the existence of late bloomers therefore leads to a significant underestimation of the returns to college education for those finishing college in their early 20s.

Education Expansion, Sorting, and the Decreasing Wage Premium, 2023

This paper has received the ‘Honorable Mention’ Award at the 2022 IAAE Conference.

This paper studies the interplay between education expansion and workers and firms sorting in Portugal between 1987 and 2017. The Portuguese labor market is characterized by three facts: a decreasing high school wage premium, a dramatic increase in supply of high school graduates, and an increasingly unbalanced distribution of high school graduates across industries. To quantify the impact of the latter two on the former, I build a model of one-to-many matching where workers sort with firms based on their own preferences, their relative productivity within the firm, and substitution patterns with other workers. Using tool from the optimal transport literature, I solve the model and structurally estimate it on matched employer-employee data. Estimates suggest changes in sorting are mainly driven by heterogeneous increase in relative productivity of high school graduates relative to non graduates across industries. It acts as a mitigating force on the decreasing high school wage premium, but does not fully compensate for high school graduates' rise in relative supply.

The data was kindly provided by the Instituto Nacional de Estatistica with the help of Francesco Franco at Nova SBE in Lisbon.

Work in Progress

Repeated Matching Games: an Empirical Framework, with Jeremy Fox and Alfred Galichon

On the Estimation of Scaling parameters in Separable Matching Models, with Arnaud Dupuy

Parallel Matching Markets, with Alejandro Robinson Cortes