We use a simple model of statistical discrimination to empirically disentangle two different sources of racial wage inequality: differences in the distribution of pre-market factors that affect human capital, and differences in incentives to acquire human capital when young. We show how the...

What are the sources of rapid wage growth during a worker's early career? To address this question, I construct and estimate a model of strategic wage bargaining with on-the-job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match-specific capital, and outside...

This paper presents a unified treatment of and explanation for the evolution of wages and employment in the U.S. over the last 30 years. Specifically, we account for the pattern of changes in wage inequality, for the increased relative wage and employment of women, for the emergence of the...

We study the optimal long-term contract offered to workers when firms are financially constrained in their investment plans. To alleviate the tightness of the financial constraints, firms promise an increasing wage profile to workers, that is, they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher...

A dynamic general equilibrium model of work, schooling, occupational and sectoral decisions is developed and estimated. The model is fit to data on life cycle employment, schooling, occupational and sectoral decisions, and on life cycle labor earnings, within and between cohorts observed in the...