There is a general misconception on the impact of marginal tax rates. Following the hypothesis of optimising economic agents, it is proper that marginal rates enter the discussion. The only issue is that the margin mu= st be computed correctly. In dynamics, one must take account of the fact tha=...

An important question about social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare; I address it by examining the characteristics of tipped and non-tipped occupations. Tipping prevalence is negatively correlated with worker’s income and consumer’s monitoring ability and positively with...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

This paper applies parametric and nonparametric techniques to the most recent data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) 1992- 2000 and shows the returns to schooling increased over the course of transition, overall and for attainment cohorts neither at the top nor bottom of the...

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the effects of taxation on income distribution in a model with efficiency wages and involuntary unemployment. Central to the efficiency-wage theory is the hypothesis that firms may set wages above market-clearing levels, whenever the productivity of...

This paper examines the associations between obesity, employment status and wages for several European countries. Our results provide weak evidence that obese workers are more likely to be unemployed or tend to be more segregated in self-employment jobs than their non-obese counterparts. We also...

In this paper, I examine the impact of employer-provided health benefits on job turnover. Because many employer-provided plans extend coverage to a worker's entire family, the value of an employer's employment offer to a worker depends on whether the worker's spouse provides the family with...

I explore the nature of optimal static and dynamic contracts in an environment with moral hazard, where individuals contracting with the same principal receive correlated productivity shocks. The environment resembles the one considered in relative compensation theory ( i.e tournament theory),...

In this paper we investigate the implications of labour and capital market imperfections for the relationship between firm size and earnings. To establish that such a question is of interest we need to show that the firm size-wage effect cannot be explained by either the observed or unobserved...

Using the rich data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that several dimensions of college quality have positive impacts on young women's wages. We find evidence of ability sorting, but controlling for ability, women who attend higher quality colleges earn higher wages. Women...