Essays in Empirical Labor Economics: Dissertation Summary

This dissertation contains three essays which are loosely organized around the role that educational attainment and skill plays in the labor market. The first essay examines the effects of the large changes in the supply of immigrant labor to the U.S. labor market during the 1980s. The second essay estimates sheepskin effects in the returns to education using a data set that contains information on both degrees received and the highest grade that individuals completed. This essay was written jointly with Marianne Page. The third essay proposes a reconciliation scheme for the old and new educational attainment questions in the Current Population Survey and the decennial U.S. Census