ECONOMICS RESEARCH
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Labor markets, skills, inequality, policy, and mobility
2
EDUCATION + EARNINGS
Angrist, J. D., & Krueger, A. B. (1991). Does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and
earnings? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(4), 979-1014.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2937954
ANNOTATION
Angrist and Krueger use variation in quarter of birth created by school-entry rules and compulsory
attendance laws to estimate the effect of additional schooling on earnings. The approach treats
quarter of birth as an instrumental variable, allowing the authors to address concerns about the
relationship between education and unobserved ability. The study is useful for economics research
because it demonstrates how economists can identify causal effects when direct experimentation is
not possible. It also connects education policy with human-capital theory and labor-market returns.
EARNINGS INEQUALITY
Autor, D. H. (2014). Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the "other 99
percent." Science, 344(6186), 843-851. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251868
ANNOTATION
Autor reviews evidence on the rise in earnings inequality outside the very highest incomes and
emphasizes the role of education, skills, and changes in the demand for labor. He considers why skill
demands have increased and how technology and the organization of production have affected
different parts of the earnings distribution. The article is useful because it places inequality within a
broader labor-market framework rather than treating the top 1 percent as the whole story. As a
review in Science, it also gives a concise bridge between specialized labor-economics studies and a
broader economic interpretation of wage inequality.
INTERGENERATIONAL
MOBILITY
Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography
of intergenerational mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4),
1553-1623. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022
ANNOTATION
Chetty and colleagues use administrative tax records covering more than 40 million children and
their parents to study economic mobility across U.S. areas. They show that mobility varies
substantially by place and examine how local characteristics such as residential segregation, income
inequality, schools, social capital, and family stability are correlated with upward mobility. The study
is useful for economics because it links household income across generations with geographic
differences in economic opportunity. Its large administrative dataset also illustrates how modern
empirical economics can combine population-scale records with careful descriptive analysis.
