https://umich.zoom.us/s/96736010964
Meeting ID: 967 3601 0964
Passcode: 685364

Abstract: This paper presents a simple estimator for pricing job amenities in the presence of unobserved worker ability. First described in Bell (2020) and Bell et al. (2024), the approach treats ability as a structured residual that jointly shapes access to both pay and non-pay job attributes. Job choice is assumed to be governed by a single vertical job-quality index, and, conditional on this index, an observed proxy for worker ability serves as an “anti-instrument” for recovering amenity prices. Identification hinges on a conditional independence assumption: if pay, amenities, and true ability were observed, the anti-instrument would be redundant. I demonstrate that this approach generates amenity price estimates in line with experimental evidence from Mas and Pallais (2017), illustrating how observational data can replicate gold-standard experimental insights when first-order differences in workers’ offer sets are allowed to translate into better jobs not only in terms of pay, but also along non-pay dimensions. The talk will also discuss how these ideas shed new light on patterns observed in major survey datasets, including how the PSID can be used to study the role of job choice primitives in intergenerational economic mobility.

Bio: Alex Bell is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. His research, grounded in labor economics, focuses on inequality and innovation, with methodological contributions to the study of compensating differentials. His work has appeared in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and he received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University.