We study how large shocks impact individuals' skilling decisions using data from the largest onli... more We study how large shocks impact individuals' skilling decisions using data from the largest online learning platform in Saudi Arabia. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a massive increase in online skilling, and demand shifted towards courses that offered skills, such as telework, likely to be immediately valuable during the pandemic. Consistent with a model where individuals trade off reskilling costs with their expectations of future labor market conditions and their duration of work, we find that shifts into telework courses were largest for older workers. In contrast, younger workers increased enrollments in courses related to new skills, such as general, occupation-specific, and computer-related skills. Using national administrative employment data, we provide suggestive evidence that these investments in skills in early 2020 helped users maintain employment over the course of the pandemic.
This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich da... more This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich dataset of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper-pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the US, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field-specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to "spill over" to natives.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Wage Ceilings and Floors: The Gender Gap in Ukraine's Transition * This paper uses new micro data... more Wage Ceilings and Floors: The Gender Gap in Ukraine's Transition * This paper uses new micro data from the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to examine the gender gaps across the distribution of wages in Ukraine during communism (1986), the start of transition (1991), and after Ukraine started to be considered a market economy (2003). We find that the gender pay gap is higher in the top half of the distribution than at the bottom half and that this 'glass ceiling' is persistent across the three points in time, while the wage floor rose for women in 2003. Closer inspection of two sectors-the private and the public-reveals the striking finding that the glass ceiling is lower in the public than in the private sector but the floor is the same. We use the Machado and Mata (2004) method to create counterfactuals that advance our knowledge of which factors are driving these differences; we find that the differences in men's and women's rewards (βs) rather than differences in their productive characteristics (Xs) explain most of the wage gap throughout the distribution. The different ceilings in the public and private sectors are largely due to differences in men's and women's productive characteristics, which favor men in the public and women in the private sector. The fall in the gender gap in the lower part of the distribution from 1986 to 2003 is explained partially by the improvement in women's productive characteristics and partially by the worsening in men's rewards in the bottom half of the distribution over time. However, probably the most important reason for the reduction in the gap at the bottom of the distribution over time is that the value of the minimum wage was set relatively high in 2003 and it raised the wage floor for more women than men.
IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit com... more IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
We consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledge... more We consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledgeproduction process, namely knowledge transfer, creation, and diffusion. We theorize that knowledge production is systematically shaped by the field and intellectual similarity between knowledge-sharing partners' disciplines of study and domain area interests. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a natural field experiment at a medical symposium, in which exogenous variation was introduced to provide some of the 15,817 scientist pairs with opportunities for serendipitous, face-to-face encounters. Our data include direct observations of interaction patterns collected using sociometric badges, and detailed longitudinal data on the scientists' publication records for six years following the symposium. We find both cooperative and competitive effects of cognitive similarity on knowledge production. While knowledge sharing increases the transfer of scientific concepts between scientists with some intellectual overlap, it reduces the diffusion of scientific knowledge between scientists from the same field. In contrast, cognitive similarity does not have a direct effect on knowledge creation, but we find that scientists who have initiated early-stage collaborations with one another are more likely to persist and publish together. The findings suggest that some cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners can boost organizational knowledge production, but too much similarity may impede it.
This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 20... more This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 2015 and decomposes those changes into components representing shifts within occupations and changes in occupational employment shares. Per our title, within-occupation changes dominate, raising doubts about the ability of projections based on expected changes in the occupational composition of employment to capture the likely future of work. Indeed, our data show only weak relationships between automatability, repetitiveness, and other job attributes and changes in occupational employment. The results suggest that analysts give greater attention to within-occupation impacts of technology in assessing the future of work.
The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe led to sudden increas... more The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe led to sudden increases in emigration and large changes in wage inequality. This has provided a unique opportunity to understand how these changes altered incentives to emigrate during the transition period. In this paper, I analyze immigrant selection before and after the fall of the Soviet Union within a Roy Model framework, in which the relative return to skills determines the skill composition of immigrants. Using micro-level data from Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, matched to Census data on immigrants from these countries in the United States, Spain and Greece in the post-Soviet period, I find evidence of positive selection of immigrants in the US, and negative selection for Greece and Spain. Using retrospective data from Ukraine during the communist period, I find that selection among Soviet men in the US was intermediate and selection among women was positive.
Working paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), 2019
We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of U.S. patent interferen... more We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of U.S. patent interferences terminated between 1998 and 2014. Interferences resulted when two or more independent parties submitted identical claims of invention nearly simultaneously. Following the idea that inventors of identical inventions share common knowledge inputs, interferences provide a new method for measuring knowledge spillovers. Interfering inventors are 1.4 to 4 times more likely to live in the same local area than matched control pairs of inventors. They are also more geographically concentrated than citation-linked inventors. Our results emphasize geographic distance as a barrier to tacit knowledge flows.
partially supports the AAMC Faculty Roster under contract HHSN263200900009C. We thank Bruce Weinb... more partially supports the AAMC Faculty Roster under contract HHSN263200900009C. We thank Bruce Weinberg and participants of the NBER Innovation in an Aging Society meetings for useful discussions. All errors are our own. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
How does the emigration of 'top scientific brains' impact the development of the next generation ... more How does the emigration of 'top scientific brains' impact the development of the next generation of scientists? I provide new empirical evidence on the impact of emigration on human capital formation by drawing upon the exodus of Russian scientists after the end of the Soviet Union. I create a novel panel dataset based on scientific publications to estimate emigration of former Soviet scientists combined with official Russian statistics on the production of PhDs aggregated at the regional and scientific field levels. I show that the emigration of scientists in the post-Soviet period is associated with lower production of PhDs measured by admissions, graduates, and the number of students. The results suggest that emigration is not increasing investment in human capital at the PhD level. Possible explanations are that there is a lack of mentors to train the next generation of PhD students and that émigrés are acting as channel for the younger generation to emigrate to pursue PhD studies abroad.
This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich da... more This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich data set of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the United States, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field–specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to “spill over” to natives.
Christian Zimmerman, and participants at the IfW/ZBW Future of Scholarly Communication in Economi... more Christian Zimmerman, and participants at the IfW/ZBW Future of Scholarly Communication in Economics workshop for comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
In this paper we establish six stylized facts related to marriage and work in Latin America and p... more In this paper we establish six stylized facts related to marriage and work in Latin America and present a simple model to account for them. First, skilled women are less likely to be married than unskilled women. Second, skilled women are less likely to be married than skilled men. Third, married skilled men are more likely to work than unmarried
We present the results of a field experiment conducted within the Harvard Medical School system o... more We present the results of a field experiment conducted within the Harvard Medical School system of hospitals and research centers to understand how colocation impacts the likelihood of scientific collaboration. We introduce exogenous colocation and face-to-face interactions for a random subset of biomedical researchers responding to an opportunity to apply for a research grant. While the overall baseline likelihood of any two researchers collaborating is small, we find that random colocation significantly increases the likelihood of pair-level coapplication by almost 70%. The effect of exogenous colocation on subsequent collaboration was greater for previous coauthors, pairs including a woman, and pairs researching similar clinical areas. Our results suggest that matching between scientists may be subject to considerable frictions-even among those in relatively close geographic proximity and in the same organizational system. At the same time, even a brief and focused intervention facilitating face-to-face interactions can provide information that impacts the formation of scientific collaborations.
We study how large shocks impact individuals' skilling decisions using data from the largest onli... more We study how large shocks impact individuals' skilling decisions using data from the largest online learning platform in Saudi Arabia. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a massive increase in online skilling, and demand shifted towards courses that offered skills, such as telework, likely to be immediately valuable during the pandemic. Consistent with a model where individuals trade off reskilling costs with their expectations of future labor market conditions and their duration of work, we find that shifts into telework courses were largest for older workers. In contrast, younger workers increased enrollments in courses related to new skills, such as general, occupation-specific, and computer-related skills. Using national administrative employment data, we provide suggestive evidence that these investments in skills in early 2020 helped users maintain employment over the course of the pandemic.
This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich da... more This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich dataset of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper-pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the US, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field-specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to "spill over" to natives.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Wage Ceilings and Floors: The Gender Gap in Ukraine's Transition * This paper uses new micro data... more Wage Ceilings and Floors: The Gender Gap in Ukraine's Transition * This paper uses new micro data from the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to examine the gender gaps across the distribution of wages in Ukraine during communism (1986), the start of transition (1991), and after Ukraine started to be considered a market economy (2003). We find that the gender pay gap is higher in the top half of the distribution than at the bottom half and that this 'glass ceiling' is persistent across the three points in time, while the wage floor rose for women in 2003. Closer inspection of two sectors-the private and the public-reveals the striking finding that the glass ceiling is lower in the public than in the private sector but the floor is the same. We use the Machado and Mata (2004) method to create counterfactuals that advance our knowledge of which factors are driving these differences; we find that the differences in men's and women's rewards (βs) rather than differences in their productive characteristics (Xs) explain most of the wage gap throughout the distribution. The different ceilings in the public and private sectors are largely due to differences in men's and women's productive characteristics, which favor men in the public and women in the private sector. The fall in the gender gap in the lower part of the distribution from 1986 to 2003 is explained partially by the improvement in women's productive characteristics and partially by the worsening in men's rewards in the bottom half of the distribution over time. However, probably the most important reason for the reduction in the gap at the bottom of the distribution over time is that the value of the minimum wage was set relatively high in 2003 and it raised the wage floor for more women than men.
IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit com... more IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
We consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledge... more We consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledgeproduction process, namely knowledge transfer, creation, and diffusion. We theorize that knowledge production is systematically shaped by the field and intellectual similarity between knowledge-sharing partners' disciplines of study and domain area interests. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a natural field experiment at a medical symposium, in which exogenous variation was introduced to provide some of the 15,817 scientist pairs with opportunities for serendipitous, face-to-face encounters. Our data include direct observations of interaction patterns collected using sociometric badges, and detailed longitudinal data on the scientists' publication records for six years following the symposium. We find both cooperative and competitive effects of cognitive similarity on knowledge production. While knowledge sharing increases the transfer of scientific concepts between scientists with some intellectual overlap, it reduces the diffusion of scientific knowledge between scientists from the same field. In contrast, cognitive similarity does not have a direct effect on knowledge creation, but we find that scientists who have initiated early-stage collaborations with one another are more likely to persist and publish together. The findings suggest that some cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners can boost organizational knowledge production, but too much similarity may impede it.
This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 20... more This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 2015 and decomposes those changes into components representing shifts within occupations and changes in occupational employment shares. Per our title, within-occupation changes dominate, raising doubts about the ability of projections based on expected changes in the occupational composition of employment to capture the likely future of work. Indeed, our data show only weak relationships between automatability, repetitiveness, and other job attributes and changes in occupational employment. The results suggest that analysts give greater attention to within-occupation impacts of technology in assessing the future of work.
The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe led to sudden increas... more The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe led to sudden increases in emigration and large changes in wage inequality. This has provided a unique opportunity to understand how these changes altered incentives to emigrate during the transition period. In this paper, I analyze immigrant selection before and after the fall of the Soviet Union within a Roy Model framework, in which the relative return to skills determines the skill composition of immigrants. Using micro-level data from Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, matched to Census data on immigrants from these countries in the United States, Spain and Greece in the post-Soviet period, I find evidence of positive selection of immigrants in the US, and negative selection for Greece and Spain. Using retrospective data from Ukraine during the communist period, I find that selection among Soviet men in the US was intermediate and selection among women was positive.
Working paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), 2019
We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of U.S. patent interferen... more We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of U.S. patent interferences terminated between 1998 and 2014. Interferences resulted when two or more independent parties submitted identical claims of invention nearly simultaneously. Following the idea that inventors of identical inventions share common knowledge inputs, interferences provide a new method for measuring knowledge spillovers. Interfering inventors are 1.4 to 4 times more likely to live in the same local area than matched control pairs of inventors. They are also more geographically concentrated than citation-linked inventors. Our results emphasize geographic distance as a barrier to tacit knowledge flows.
partially supports the AAMC Faculty Roster under contract HHSN263200900009C. We thank Bruce Weinb... more partially supports the AAMC Faculty Roster under contract HHSN263200900009C. We thank Bruce Weinberg and participants of the NBER Innovation in an Aging Society meetings for useful discussions. All errors are our own. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
How does the emigration of 'top scientific brains' impact the development of the next generation ... more How does the emigration of 'top scientific brains' impact the development of the next generation of scientists? I provide new empirical evidence on the impact of emigration on human capital formation by drawing upon the exodus of Russian scientists after the end of the Soviet Union. I create a novel panel dataset based on scientific publications to estimate emigration of former Soviet scientists combined with official Russian statistics on the production of PhDs aggregated at the regional and scientific field levels. I show that the emigration of scientists in the post-Soviet period is associated with lower production of PhDs measured by admissions, graduates, and the number of students. The results suggest that emigration is not increasing investment in human capital at the PhD level. Possible explanations are that there is a lack of mentors to train the next generation of PhD students and that émigrés are acting as channel for the younger generation to emigrate to pursue PhD studies abroad.
This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich da... more This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich data set of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the United States, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field–specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to “spill over” to natives.
Christian Zimmerman, and participants at the IfW/ZBW Future of Scholarly Communication in Economi... more Christian Zimmerman, and participants at the IfW/ZBW Future of Scholarly Communication in Economics workshop for comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
In this paper we establish six stylized facts related to marriage and work in Latin America and p... more In this paper we establish six stylized facts related to marriage and work in Latin America and present a simple model to account for them. First, skilled women are less likely to be married than unskilled women. Second, skilled women are less likely to be married than skilled men. Third, married skilled men are more likely to work than unmarried
We present the results of a field experiment conducted within the Harvard Medical School system o... more We present the results of a field experiment conducted within the Harvard Medical School system of hospitals and research centers to understand how colocation impacts the likelihood of scientific collaboration. We introduce exogenous colocation and face-to-face interactions for a random subset of biomedical researchers responding to an opportunity to apply for a research grant. While the overall baseline likelihood of any two researchers collaborating is small, we find that random colocation significantly increases the likelihood of pair-level coapplication by almost 70%. The effect of exogenous colocation on subsequent collaboration was greater for previous coauthors, pairs including a woman, and pairs researching similar clinical areas. Our results suggest that matching between scientists may be subject to considerable frictions-even among those in relatively close geographic proximity and in the same organizational system. At the same time, even a brief and focused intervention facilitating face-to-face interactions can provide information that impacts the formation of scientific collaborations.
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Papers by Ina Ganguli