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Workers with Unique Competence at Their Workplace Say “I’m Taking a Sick Day” Less Often

Workers with unique competence have 10 percent lower sickness absence.

In many production processes, there is a high degree of complementarity between employees in different jobs—in other words, workers with unique functions are each essential and depend on each other to get the work done. In such cases, work absence can be costly for firms, especially if there are few employees with similar skills who can substitute for the absent worker. In a new study, Lena Hensvik and Olof Rosenqvist (both at Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Uppsala, Sweden) explore how employers are addressing this problem.
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Are Executives Earning It? How Product Market Competition Shapes Executives’ Pay

CEO pay

The pay of CEOs and other top executives has been the focus of academic and policy debates given its sharp increase in recent decades. A key question for many is whether executive pay is linked to the performance of the firms they manage. In a new paper, Ana P. Fernandes (University of Exeter), Priscila Ferreira (University of Minho), and L. Alan Winters (University of Sussex) explore how performance-related pay is affected by the level of competition in the markets that firms sell in.
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For-Profit Schools Are Not Improving the Earnings of Their Graduates

graduates

In “Gainfully employed? New evidence on the earnings, employment, and debt of for-profit certificate students,” Stephanie Riegg Cellini (Brown Center on Education Policy) reports on her work with Nicholas Turner (Federal Reserve Board of Governors). They studied 14 years of earnings for more than 800,000 federally aided certificate students to determine how well for-profit schools are doing.
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Job Corps Improves Earnings, Employment, and Use of Public Benefits…Even for Eligible Nonparticipants

Job Corps effects

Government-sponsored job training programs are believed to be essential to improve the job prospects of economically disadvantaged citizens and reduce dependence on safety net programs, but do they work? Job Corps is the main federal training program in the United States targeted at disadvantaged youth ages 16 to 24. Xuan Chen (Renmin University of China), Carlos A. Flores (California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo), and Alfonso Flores-Lagunes (Syracuse University) measure the effectiveness of Job Corps training and find a positive effect on three important outcomes—earnings, employment, and amount of public benefits received.
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AP Exam Scores Impact College Major Choice

students and AP scores

The choice of college major can have big implications for students’ long-term outcomes, such as lifetime earnings, but researchers have limited evidence on what helps shape this decision. New research by Christopher Avery (Harvard University), Oded Gurantz (Stanford University, College Board), Michael Hurwitz (College Board), and Jonathan Smith (Georgia State University) examined how Advanced Placement (AP), a national program that exposes high school students to a college-level curriculum, shapes students’ choice of college major.
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