Articles

Matching strategies of teachers and schools in general equilibrium

I use a structural matching model, North Carolina public school data, and a survey of teachers’ career plans to analyze schools’ and teachers’ behaviors in the teacher transfer market. Results show that mid-ca...

Authors: Tom Ahn

College major peer effects and attrition from the sciences

This paper examines how peer quality within distinct college majors affects graduation rates and major persistence. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for school-specific fixed effects, as well as v...

Authors: Marc Luppino and Richard Sander

Locus of control and the labor market

This paper reviews the role of locus of control in the labor market. I begin with a discussion of the conceptual origins of locus of control, including its relationship to related concepts such as self-efficac...

Authors: Deborah A Cobb-Clark

The unhappily unemployed return to work faster

This paper shows that job loss is associated with a fall in subjective well-being (SWB). It then looks at how this change in SWB predicts job search and unemployment duration. The findings suggest that those w...

Authors: Dimitris Mavridis

The price of fringe benefits when formal and informal labor markets coexist

We use the Mexican labor market structure to price the set of fringe benefits that household heads receive when formally employed. We exploit longitudinal, nationally-representative information on household he...

Authors: David Argente and Jorge Luis García

The levelling effect of product market competition on gender wage discrimination

Using linked employer–employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Con...

Authors: Boris Hirsch, Michael Oberfichtner and Claus Schnabel

Common law marriage and couple formation

The Current Population Survey is used to investigate effects of Common Law Marriage (CLM) on whether young US-born adults live in couples in the US CLM effects are identified through cross-state and time varia...

Authors: Shoshana Grossbard and Victoria Vernon

Gary Becker’s early work on human capital – collaborations and distinctiveness

In a prolific and illustrious career, the late Gary Becker (1930–2014) developed what he would later call "the economic approach to human behaviour". One of the most significant strands of that research was th...

Authors: Pedro Nuno Teixeira

Kinky choices, dictators and split might: a non-cooperative model for household consumption and labor supply

We model consumption and labor supply behavior of a couple in a non-cooperative setting. Using minimal assumptions, we prove that demand for public goods is characterized by three regimes. It is either determi...

Authors: Jan Boone, Karen van der Wiel, Arthur van Soest and Frederic Vermeulen

Percent plans, automatic admissions, and college outcomes

Access to selective universities is highly coveted because of the perception that attending one provides opportunities otherwise difficult to obtain. To broaden access to the state’s flagship universities in a...

Authors: Lindsay Daugherty, Paco Martorell and Isaac McFarlin Jr

Dissimilar occupations and marital stability

We show that information revealed by the occupation choices of spouses predicts marital dissolution. Using a novel measure of occupational distance constructed from the O*Net Content Model, we find that spouse...

Authors: Ben Van Kammen and Scott J Adams

Retirement intentions in the presence of technological change: theory and evidence from France

This paper investigates the role of productivity as a determinant of the worker’s retirement intentions. Using an overlapping generation framework, we analyze the retirement decision of a cohort of workers bei...

Authors: Pierre-Jean Messe, Eva Moreno-Galbis and Francois-Charles Wolff

Affirmative action and university fit: evidence from Proposition 209

Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system befo...

Authors: Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, Patrick Coate and V Joseph Hotz

Why do wages become more rigid during a recession than during a boom?

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of performance-based layoffs on wage rigidity in the context of performance pay. In the model, it becomes optimal for firms to raise futur...

Authors: Izumi Yokoyama

The effect of banning affirmative action on human capital accumulation prior to college entry

This paper examines how banning affirmative action in university admissions affects both overall academic achievement and the racial gap in academic achievement prior to college entry. Focusing on college-boun...

Authors: Kate Antonovics and Ben Backes

Are nonprofit entrepreneurs also Jacks-of-all-trades?

We investigate whether nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurs share similar observable and unobservable skills. In JLE 23:649-680, 2005 ‘Jacks-of-all-Trades’ model of entrepreneurship, individuals with more di...

Authors: Insoo Cho and Peter F Orazem

Absenteeism, unemployment and employment protection legislation: evidence from Italy

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis ai...

Authors: Vincenzo Scoppa and Daniela Vuri

Study versus television

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academicoutcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effortif school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that em...

Authors: Martin Browning and Eskil Heinesen

Windfall gains and labour supply: evidence from the European household panel

D12, J22.

Authors: Urban Sila and Ricardo M Sousa

The impact of parental income and education on the schooling of their children

We investigate the relationship between early school-leaving and parental education and paternal income using UK Labour Force Survey data. OLS estimation reveals modest effects of income, stronger effects of m...

Authors: Arnaud Chevalier, Colm Harmon, Vincent O’ Sullivan and Ian Walker

The plant life-cycle of the average wage of employees in U.S. manufacturing

This paper explores the evolution of the average wage of employees over the life-cycle of a manufacturing plant. The average wage starts out low for a new plant and increases along with labor productivity as t...

Authors: Emin Dinlersoz, Henry R Hyatt and Sang V Nguyen

Do Public Employment and Training Programs Work?

We estimate impacts on earnings and employment of the two primary adult workforce support and training programs under the U.S. Workforce Investment Act (WIA) using administrative data on 160,000 participants f...

Authors: Carolyn J Heinrich, Peter R Mueser, Kenneth R Troske, Kyung-Seong Jeon and Daver C Kahvecioglu

The recent decline in employment dynamics

We document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics in the U.S. We have four major empirical findings. First, each measure exhibits a “stair step” pattern, with the declines concentrat...

Authors: Henry R Hyatt and James R Spletzer

Hiring discrimination based on national origin and religious closeness: results from a field experiment in the Paris area

This study uses the findings of a test carried out by correspondence in order to assess separately the potential hiring effects of North African origin and Muslim or Catholic religious affiliation in the Frenc...

Authors: Guillaume Pierné

The consequences of measurement error when estimating the impact of obesity on income

This paper examines the consequences of using self-reported measures of BMI when estimating the effect of BMI on income for women using both Irish and US data. We find that self-reported BMI is subject to subs...

Authors: Donal O’Neill and Olive Sweetman

The role of location in evaluating racial wage disparity

A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual’s log wage is a function of education, experience, and race. We analyze this approach in a c...

Authors: Dan A Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, Seth G Sanders and Lowell J Taylor

The labour supply effects of a partial cash-out of in-kind transfers to single mothers

We estimate a model of labour supply and participation in multiple cash and in-kind welfare programmes. The modeling exploits a reform that affected U.K. single mothers. In-work cash entitlements increased und...

Authors: Paul Bingley and Ian Walker

Persistent inter‐industry wage differences: rent sharing and opportunity costs

We reconsider the potential for explaining inter‐industry wage differences by decomposing those differences into parts due to individual and employer heterogeneity, respectively. Using longitudinally linked em...

Authors: John M Abowd, Francis Kramarz, Paul Lengermann, Kevin L McKinney and Sébastien Roux

Fat spouses and hours of work: are body and Pareto weights correlated?

We explore the relationship between relative physical attractiveness in the household and the hours worked by married men and women. Using PSID data, we find that husbands who are thinner relative to their wiv...

Authors: Sonia Oreffice and Climent Quintana-Domeque

What happens after enrollment? An analysis of the time path of racial differences in GPA and major choice

At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action polic...

Authors: Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M Aucejo and Ken Spenner

The use of cognitive ability measures as explanatory variables in regression analysis

Cognitive ability measures are often taken as explanatory variables in regression analysis, e.g., as a factor affecting a market outcome such as an individual’s wage, or a decision such as an individual’s educ...

Authors: Brian Junker, Lynne Steuerle Schofield and Lowell J Taylor

Personality and marital surplus

This paper uses data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study to examine the effect of personality traits on the formation and dissolution of domestic partnerships. Selection into marriage is associated with...

Authors: Shelly Lundberg

Tall or taller, pretty or prettier: is discrimination absolute or relative?

Using microeconomic data sets from the United States and the Netherlands, this study considers how agents perceive characteristics that are discriminated against. It uses the examples of beauty and height to e...

Authors: Daniel S Hamermesh

Editorial: IZA Journal of Labor Economics

Authors: Pierre Cahuc, V Joseph Hotz, Anne C Gielen and Klaus F Zimmermann