NBER Publications by Robert A. Shakotko

The extent to which wages rise with the accumulation of seniority(tenure) in a firm after one controls for total labor market experience is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings. A variety of studies have found a large, positive partial effect of tenure on wages. This paper re-examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with well known estimation biases which arise from the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics affecting the wage. We use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure. The variation intenure over the job, in contrast to variation in tenure across individuals and jobs, is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual s...

This paper is an empirical investigation of the effect of poor early life-cycle health on post-secondary educational choices and outcomes. We use panel data for a sample of 10,430 individuals who were high school seniors in the spring of 1972, and who were re-surveyed in October of each year through 1976. Various health information was collected in the base year of the survey, and we use these base year reports as measures of health which are predetermined with respect to educational behavior in the subsequent five years. We examine individuals' choices of post-secondary activities (which include different types of post-secondary education and no post-secondary education), and the rate at which individuals leave educational activities, in an effort to determine if the behavior of disabled ...

This paper is an empirical exploration of the dynamic relationship between health and cognitive development in a longitudinal data set compiled from two nationally representative cross-sections of children. Our results indicate that there is feedback both from health to cognitive development and from cognitive development to health, but the latter of these relationships is stronger. They also indicate that estimates of family background effects taken from the dynamic model -- which can be assumed to be less influenced by genetic factors are smaller than their cross-sectional counterparts, but some still remain statistically significant. The first finding calls attention to the existence of a continuing inter-action between health and cognitive development over the life cycle. The second f...

This paper is an empirical investigation of childhood and adolescent health and cognitive development as determined by family economic variables. The model proposed recognizes that these processes may be jointly dependent, and may in part be determined by common unobserved factors; these factors may also be correlated with the observed family economic variables. A two-factor model is estimated using panel data, and the results indicate that when such factors are taken account of, family income is estimated to have no significant influence on health and cognitive development, but parents' education a strong positive influence.