Has there been an increase in positive assortative mating? Does assortative mating contribute to household income inequality? Data from the United States Census Bureau suggests there has been a rise in assortative mating. Additionally, assortative mating affects household income inequality. In...

Egalitarianism and meritocracy are competing principles to distribute the joint benefits of cooperation. We examine the consequences of letting members of society vote between those two principles, in a context where individuals must joint with others into coalitions of a certain size to become...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Income inequality among households has also widened. A...

Structural unemployment is due to mismatch between available jobs and workers. We formalize this concept in a simple model of a segmented labor market with search frictions within segments. Worker mobility, job mobility and wage bargaining costs across segments generate structural unemployment....

While much of the literature on immigrants assimilation has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with flexible labor markets, very little is known on how immigrants adjust to other types of host economies. With its severe dual labor market, and an unprecedented...

This paper is the first to examine the implications of switching to PT work for womens subsequent earnings trajectories, distinguishing by their type of contract: permanent or fixedterm. Using a rich longitudinal Spanish data set from Social Security records of over 76,000 prime-aged women...

This paper presents a theoretical model that can aid the understanding of how wage inequality and mobility are jointly determined. The model shows that the correlation between inequality and mobility can be used to identify the cause of changes in inequality. Changes in the production sector...

In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments are often justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

Donors often rely on local intermediaries to deliver benefits to target beneficiaries. Each selected recipient observes if the intermediary under-delivers to them, so they serve as natural monitors. However, they may withhold complaints when feeling unentitled or grateful to the intermediary for...