Essays on Occupational Choice, College Major, and Career Outcomes

This dissertation contains three chapters that examine the relationships between a worker's skills, economic conditions, and career outcomes. Specifically, the first chapter analyzes the effects of pre-labor market cognitive and noncognitive skills on the occupational outcomes of workers. The second chapter estimates the effects of graduating college during a recession and asks if those effects are different across college majors. It also looks specifically at the Great Recession's effect on new college graduates. The third chapter examines the effect of leaving high school in a recession.;The first chapter uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1979 and 1997 cohorts, which are nationally representative panel surveys following workers from their teenage years well into their careers. The key advantage of the NLSYs for my purposes is that they also include a variety of cognitive and noncognitive pre-market skill measures, which I can then link to career outcomes. I combine these data with O*Net, which contains data on the task requirements of each occupation. I find that pre-market skills are strong predictors of the corresponding task content of the workers' occupations, both initially and much later in their careers. Career trajectories are similar across worker skill types, implying that initial differences in occupation persist over the course of a career.;I provide two policy-relevant applications of this framework. First, I study the role played by pre-market skills in the differing occupational outcomes of men and women. The skill measures I use account for a portion of occupational gender gaps, including 70% of the gap in science and engineering occupations. Second, I quantify the effect of layoffs on occupational attainment and career trajectory. I find that a layoff erases about one-fourth of a worker's total career increase in task content, but within 3 years, this effect is typically undone.;The second chapter, which is joint with Joseph G. Altonji and Lisa B. Kahn, estimates the effects of graduating college during a recession on labor market outcomes and asks if those effects are different across college majors. We combine seven data sources to cover U.S. college graduates from the classes of 1976 to 2011. We also categorize college majors by average economic outcomes and skill level of the major and measure a range of labor market outcomes over the first 13 years after college graduation. We have three main findings. First, poor labor market conditions disrupt early careers. For the average major, a large recession at the time of graduation reduces earnings and wages by roughly 11% and 4% (respectively) in the first year. Second, for the period as a whole, these effects are differential across college majors. High-earning majors are somewhat sheltered when graduating in a recession relative to the average major, experiencing significantly smaller disadvantages in most labor market outcomes measured. As a result, the initial earnings and wage gaps across college majors widen by 33% and 8%, respectively, for those graduating into a large recession. Our third set of results focuses on a recent period that includes the Great Recession. Early impacts on earnings are double what we would have expected given past patterns and the size of the recession. The effects are also dispersed much more evenly across college majors than those of prior recessions.;The third chapter uses the weekly work history data from the NLSY's 1979 cohort to analyze the effect of leaving high school during a recession. These data allow me to precisely measure labor market outcomes and the school-to-work transition. I document severe but short-lived effects of leaving school in a recession on wages, job quality, and the transition time from school to work for men with 9 to 12 years of education. In contrast to published evidence on more educated workers, I find large effects on work hours on both the extensive and intensive margins. When workers leave high school in a recession, they work fewer total weeks and more part-time weeks in their first year in the labor market. They also take substantially longer to find a job, have less access to on-the-job training, and report lower promotion possibilities. Effects of the entry unemployment rate on wages are also large. A 4-point rise in the initial unemployment rate leads to a 21% decline in year-one average wage, a 32% fall in hours worked in the first year, and a 54% decline in first-year earnings. However, the effects of economic conditions are not persistent; by year four, there is no effect on wages, hours, or earnings.