Labor I: Workers, Human Capital, and Inequality

Labor I is the first semester of the core labor-economics field sequence. It introduces the worker side of labor markets: how labor-market outcomes are measured, how workers choose and adjust labor supply, how skills are built, how wages and inequality emerge, and how households, discrimination, mobility, policy, and behavioral frictions shape observed outcomes.

The course is designed to be readable for advanced master’s and doctoral students while remaining research-facing. It begins from canonical worker-side models and empirical designs, then builds toward the broader questions that motivate modern labor economics and set up the transition to Labor II.

Course position in the sequence¶

Labor I provides the worker-side foundations of the sequence. Its emphasis is on labor supply, human capital, wage determination, households, amenities, inequality, discrimination, mobility, and worker-targeted policy. Labor II then takes those same worker outcomes and studies them inside firms, search frictions, institutions, and aggregate shocks.

Expected background¶

• Graduate microeconomic theory or a strong equivalent

• Introductory econometrics and comfort reading applied empirical work

• For master’s or advanced undergraduate use, the Bridge sections can be read as a lighter track through the same modules

Learning goals¶

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. move from a labor-market fact to a researchable worker-side economic question;

2. connect labor supply, skill formation, households, wages, inequality, and mobility within one framework;

3. distinguish theory, evidence, and identification across canonical labor topics;

4. evaluate worker-targeted policies and behavioral frictions using modern labor-economics tools;

5. leave the first semester prepared to study firms, frictions, institutions, and shocks in Labor II.

Course format¶

The course is organized as weekly modules. Each module follows the same layered design: a Bridge section for intuition, a Field Core section for models and evidence, and a Research Lab section for frontier questions and extensions.

The default rhythm is a 3-hour core structure each week: one block for the organizing framework, one for evidence and identification, and one for discussion, extensions, or reproducibility-oriented work. Optional extensions appear in selected weeks where a topic naturally opens into deeper policy, data, or frontier material.

Weekly modules¶

• Week 1: Labor market facts, measurement, and canonical questions. The course opens by defining the objects labor economists measure and the descriptive facts later models must explain.

• Week 2: Static labor supply. The first benchmark studies hours, participation, taxes, transfers, and the distinction between intensive and extensive margins.

• Week 3: Dynamic labor supply. Intertemporal choice, lifecycle adjustment, and persistence enter once work decisions are linked across time.

• Week 4: Human capital and skill formation. Schooling, training, and skill accumulation provide the dynamic foundation for later wage and inequality questions.

• Week 5: Wage determination and returns to skill. The course turns from skill formation to how labor markets translate skill, selection, and sorting into observed pay.

• Week 6: Households, family, fertility, and time allocation. Individual labor supply is embedded in family structure, care responsibilities, and joint household decisions.

• Week 7: Job amenities and compensating differentials. Wages are broadened into total job value by bringing nonwage amenities and job quality onto the page.

• Week 8: Inequality and wage dispersion. Distributional outcomes are organized through skill, sorting, institutions, and changing returns.

• Week 9: Discrimination, measurement, and sorting. The course studies group disparities by separating mechanisms, measurement, and identification.

• Week 10: Mobility, migration, and intergenerational transmission. Worker movement across firms, places, and generations becomes a central margin of opportunity and persistence.

• Week 11: Public policy targeting workers. Earlier worker-side mechanisms are recast as policy margins involving incentives, insurance, take-up, and constraints.

• Week 12: Behavioral frictions and an introduction to behavioral labor. The rational benchmark is relaxed to study attention, beliefs, self-control, and other worker-side wedges.

• Week 13: Synthesis, student research designs, and the bridge to Labor II. The semester closes by integrating the worker-side architecture and showing where firm-side and market-wide mechanisms must enter next.

Sequence bridge¶

Labor I and Labor II are designed as one field sequence with two vantage points. Labor I builds the worker-side primitives; Labor II takes those primitives into firms, wage-setting, frictions, institutions, and major shocks.