Essays on labor market and education

The first essay "Intergenerational Mobility in Korea'' investigates intergenerational earnings mobility in Korea for sons born between 1958 and 1973 and compares Korea's mobility to that of other nations. It uses data from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study and the Household Income and Expenditure Survey conducted by the Korean National Statistics Bureau. Since no single Korean dataset includes information on both sons' and their fathers' adult earnings, this study follows the two-sample approach previously applied in Korea by Ueda (2013), whose estimated intergenerational earnings elasticity is 0.22, and extends the analysis by using fathers' earnings from more approximal cohort. The estimate of around 0.4 is similar to estimates for some already-developed countries and smaller than typical estimates for recently-developing countries.;The second essay "College Enrollment over the Business Cycle: The Role of Supply Constraints'' studies the impact of supply constraints on cyclicality in enrollment. Many studies on cyclicality of higher education examine the relationship between cyclical variation in labor market conditions, and changes in enrollment. Changes in enrollment are caused by changes on both the demand side and the supply side. However, much of the previous literature implicitly assumed elastic supply of enrollment. This study identifies institutions with supply constraints and investigates how those constraints have affected institutions decisions on enrollment, and how such effects vary across institutions. I find that, in the short run, institutions are different in capacity to absorb additional students, so that recessions have heterogeneous effects on enrollment size and on freshman achievement. During recessions, some capacity constrained institutions increase enrollment less than proportionately to the increase in the number of applications and, as a result, increase their admissions selectivity. Other institutions respond to increase in demand by accepting more students, resulting in a drop in new-student achievement.;Finally, the third essay "Racial Differences in Course-taking and Achievement Gap'' investigates the black-white differences in course-taking and achievement in high school. Despite the overall increase in course-taking intensity in the last two decades, the achievement gap between black and white high-school students has persisted. Using nationally-representative data, this study examines racial differences in the course-taking pattern and its association with the achievement gap. Initial results show a racially-different course-taking pattern in mathematics courses, in that white students are more likely to be enrolled in advanced courses than black students are, in all high-school years, and that the difference begins occurring in the first mathematics course, and increases over the years. Moreover, the black-white test-score gap in Grade 12 differs by course level and by school year of mathematics course taken.