Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We...

This paper analyzes the life-cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their effects into unearned wages (as women drop out of the labor market), loss of human capital, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of fertility,...

Many studies show that women are more risk averse than men. In this paper, following DeLeire and Levy (2004) for the US, we use family structure as a proxy for the degree of risk aversion to test the proposition that those with strong aversion to risk will make occupational choices biased...

This paper employs United States Census data to study the occupational allocation of immigrants. The data reveal that the occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grown drastically in regional labor markets over the period 1980 to 2000. We examine the extent to which this growth can be...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skill profiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not having taken this possible linkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts both of risk aversion and balanced skills...

The purpose of this paper is to study the immigrant performance in France and the impacts on the natives by drawing on research findings from the existing academic literature on the economics of French migration. The research questions are: how do immigrants fare with respect to wages,...

In modern societies, people are often classified as "White Collar" or "Blue Collar" workers: that classification not only informs social scientists about the kind of work that they do, but also about their social standing, their social interests, their family ties, and their approach to life in...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization – that is, rising employment in the...

This paper documents the major features of Jewish economic history in the first millennium to explain the distinctive occupational selection of the Jewish people into urban, skilled occupations. We show that many Jews entered urban occupations in the eighth-ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire...