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Job and wage mobility can arise from firms and workers learning about workers' ability and from workers acquiring human capital with experience. To date, the relative importance of these two mechanisms is debated. Using administrative data from one firm, I estimate a structural model that integrates them. I find the direct effect of beliefs about ability on wages, which existing work has focused on, to be small. However, by improving the sorting of workers to the firm's jobs, learning about ability is indirectly a crucial determinant of wage growth and dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women's human capital and men's income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school–educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women's human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate a life-cycle model of consumption, human capital investment, and labor supply. The interaction between human capital and labor supply toward the end of the life cycle is most novel. The estimates replicate the main features of the data, in particular the large increase in wages and small increase in labor supply at the beginning of the life cycle and the small decrease in wages but large decrease in labor supply toward the end. We show that incorporating human capital is critical when analyzing changes to Social Security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I apply Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage to a theory of factor substitutability in a model with a continuum of worker and job types. Highly skilled workers have a comparative advantage in complex jobs. The model satisfies the distance-dependent elasticity of substitution (DIDES) characteristic: substitutability between types declines with their skill distance. I analyze changes in relative wages due to human capital accumulation. The concept of a complexity dispersion parameter or compression elasticity is introduced. Empirical studies suggest its value to be equal to two: a 1 percent increase in the stock of human capital reduces the Mincerian return by 2 percent.

We conducted a survey of high-ability college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of major, and of whether to complete their degree, would affect an array of future events: earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility. We find that students perceive large "returns" to human capital not only in their own future earnings but also in other dimensions (e.g., potential spouse's earnings and fertility). We find evidence of students sorting into majors on the basis of these perceived returns. Family expectations are particularly important for female students' major choices. In a follow-up survey conducted 6 years after the initial data collection, we find a close connection between expectations and current realizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]