Browse or search publications from faculty affiliated with the lab.
Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products
This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics…
Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models
One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…
LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models
Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on…
The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market
This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from…
CAREER: A Foundation Model for Labor Sequence Data
Labor economists regularly analyze employment data by fitting predictive models to small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets. Although machine learning methods offer promise for such problems, these survey datasets are too small…
Decomposing Changes in the Gender Wage Gap over Worker Careers
A large literature in labor economics seeks to decompose observed gender wage gaps (GWGs) into different sources, including portions explained by cross-gender differences in education, occupation, and experience. This paper provides new methods…
The Heterogeneous Earnings Impact of Job Loss Across Workers, Establishments, and Markets
Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…
Effective and Scalable Programs to Facilitate Labor Market Transitions for Women in Technology
We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a low-cost and scalable program that supports women in Poland in transitioning into jobs in the information technology sector. This program, called “Challenges,” helps…
Approximate Residual Balancing: Debiased Inference of Average Treatment Effects in High Dimensions
There are many settings where researchers are interested in estimating average treatment effects and are willing to rely on the unconfoundedness assumption, which requires that the treatment assignment be as good as random conditional on…