Celeste Carruthers Does Free Community College Change Who Enlists in the Military? Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence from Tennessee Promise Abstract: Young adults in the United States face critical decisions after high school, often defined by employment, enrollment, or enlistment. Military service provides educational benefits, but the attractiveness of this pathway wanes with perceived college affordability. We use the roll out of tuition-free community college in Tennessee to study the effects of Promise scholarships on enlistment. We find a large percent decline in military enlistment driven by Army, Navy, and Coast Guard, and concentrated in low-income counties. In addition, the composition of successful enlistees shifted towards those with more mechanical and automotive aptitude.

eCornell Keynote: Freedom at sea is still a dream for hundreds of thousands of workers in commercial fishing and seafood processing. They are working in forced labor situations around the world — in Asia, in South America, and in the U.S. — and conditions are dire. Jason Judd, Executive Director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell’s ILR School, aims to end the practice of forced labor and has authored a Handbook for the detection of forced labor in commercial fishing called Towards freedom at sea: Handbook for the detection of forced labour in commercial fishing. “Our shared vision is one of freedom at sea, where forced labor has been relegated to the past and decent work is a reality for all the world’s fishers. It is our hope that this Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for actors throughout the commercial fishing industry who are working to achieve this vision.” — Jason Judd We’ll talk to Mr. Judd as well as reporter and activist Daniel Murphy about the prevalence of forced labor and how to combat it through detection and reporting. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why forced labor is still an issue in seafood supply chainsWhat works in policy or technology to combat forced labor in fishingHow new tools like the Handbook help authorities pinpoint forced laborHow new journalism and worker organizing can helpSPEAKER Jason Judd EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBAL LABOR INSTITUTE Cornell ILR School

Antoine Bertheau The Unequal Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay of Women Across Countries Abstract: We use matched employer-employee datasets from the US and Europe to document the contribution of firm-specific pay premiums to the gender hourly wage gap. Our findings are as follows: (1) The impact of firm-specific wage premiums on the gender wage gap —the firm effects gap— varies considerably across the 11 countries we study. It accounts for two-thirds of the gender wage gap in the US and, at most, one-third in Europe. (2) A decomposition of the firm effects gap into sorting (women working in lower-paying firms) and pay-setting (women earning less in similar firms) reveals stark differences across countries. The pay-setting effect explains less than 10 percent of the gender wage gaps in most countries. In countries with a lower degree of wage-setting centralization (Hungary and US) the importance of the pay-setting effect is much larger.