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This paper documents the widely perceived but little investigated notion that teachers today are less qualified than they once were. Evidence of a marked decline in the quality of young women going into teaching between 1960 and 1990 is presented, using standardized test scores, undergraduate institution selectivity, and positive assortative mating characteristics as indicators of quality. In contrast, the quality of young women becoming professionals increased. The Roy model of self-selection highlights how occupational differences in the returns to skill determine teacher quality. Estimates suggest the significance of increasing professional opportunities for women in affecting the decline in teacher quality. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this paper we show that the two major developments experienced by the US labor market-rising inequality and narrowing of the male-female wage gap-can be explained by a common source: the increase in price of cognitive skills and the decrease in price of motor skills. We obtain the price of a multidimensional vector of skills by combining a hedonic price framework with data on the skill requirements of jobs from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and workers' wages from the CPS. We find that in the 1968-1990 period the returns to cognitive skills increased 4-fold and the returns to motor skills declined by 30%. Given that the top of the wage distribution of college and high school graduates is relatively well endowed with cognitive skills, these changes in skill prices explain up to 40% of the rise in inequality among college graduates and about 20% among high school graduates. In a similar way, because women were in occupations intensive in cognitive skills while men were in motor-intensive occupations, these skill price changes explain over 80% of the observed narrowing of the male-female wage gap.

There are many fundamental issues in regional and urban economics that hinge on worker skills. This paper builds on psychological approaches to learning to characterize the role of education and agglomeration in the skill development process. While the standard approach of equating skill to worker education can be useful, there are important aspects of skill that are missed. Using a measure of skill derived from hedonic attribution, the paper explores the geographic distribution of worker traits, intelligences, and skills and considers the roles of urbanization and education in the skill development process. Copyright (c) 2009, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of child labor, schooling, and idleness (neither work nor school), with particular emphasis on the roles of child ability and household wealth in determining these decisions. We show theoretically that “idleness” may be chosen optimally by low-income households whose child is of low ability. Using a rich data set from the Philippines, we find that while other factors—including mother’s labor supply, the presence of a family business, and access to good school quality—contribute to these decisions, child ability and household wealth are the most important determinants of child idleness and the use of child labor. An implication of our findings is that any policy aiming to reduce child labor and increase child schooling should also target improvements in child ability and cognitive development through investments in the nutrition and health of poor children.