We investigate the relationship between an individuals’ reservation wage and unemployment in the local area district. Largely unexplored in the literature this adds to the work which has examined the association between employee wages and unemployment—the ‘wage curve’.

It is commonly known that every economy is faced with the problem of unevenly distributed labour demand changes across industries, occupations and regions. In competitive labour markets flexible wages and the mobility of labour would lead to a new equilibrium distribution of wages and...

We provide new evidence on the long-term impacts of peacetime conscription, using longitudinal data for Portuguese men born in 1967. These men were inducted at age 21, allowing us to use preconscription wages to control for ability differences between conscripts and nonconscripts. We find a...

In this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality. We analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition, and English public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market...

Draft-lottery estimates of the causal effects of Vietnam-era military service using 2000 census data show marked schooling gains for veterans. We argue that these gains can be attributed to Vietnam veterans' use of the GI Bill rather than draft avoidance behavior. At the same time, draft lottery...

Many countries of Europe are moving from conscripted to volunteer military forces. This paper examines the current status of those conversions and interprets them in light of an economic model of the military manpower procurement system choice developed in Warner and Asch (1996). The theoretical...

Rent extraction by public sector workers may be limited by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet. But rent extraction may be higher in regions where high amenities mute the migration response. This paper develops a theoretical model that predicts such a link between public sector wage...

Internet-based educational resources are proliferating rapidly. One concern associated with these (potentially transformative) technological changes is that they will be disequalizing—as many technologies of the last several decades have been—creating superstar teachers and a winner-take-all...

In a context of widespread concern about budget deficits, it is important to assess whether public sector pay is in line with the private sector. Our paper proposes an estimation of differences in lifetime values of employment between public and private sectors for five European countries. We...

The wage premium in the public sector, as measured by the ratio of the average wage rate in the public sector relative to the average wage rate in the private sector, varies considerably across developed economies. And, varies in some developed economies over large periods of time. Further, this...