Over the business cycle young workers experience much greater volatility of hours worked than prime-aged workers. This can arise from age differences in labor supply or labor demand characteristics. To distinguish between these, we document that, for young workers, both the cyclical volatilities...

Chang and Kim (2007) develop an incomplete asset markets model incorporating discrete labor supply and idiosyncratic labor productivity. Their results resolve long-standing puzzles for business cycle models. Specifically, they produce a low correlation between aggregate hours worked and labor...

Takahashi (2014) has uncovered coding errors in our paper, Chang and Kim (2007)-henceforth, CK. We acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes. We are grateful to Takahashi for uncovering them. While the correction decreases the volatility of the labor market wedge, we find that the main...

Changes in the work week drove a larger portion of changes in total labor input during the Great Depression of the 1930s than during other decades. Work-sharing policies appear to be responsible. Herbert Hoover created various work-sharing committees--led by key industrialists--which pushed for...

We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971–1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971...

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective joint surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may have limited influence. The job-seeker's only credible threat during bargaining is to hold out for a better deal....

We estimate the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on labor supply using local variation in knowledge about the EITC schedule. We proxy for EITC knowledge in a Zip code with the fraction of individuals who manipulate reported self-employment income to maximize their EITC refund. This...

Teacher contracts that condition pay and retention on demonstrated performance can improve selection into and out of teaching. I study alternative contracts in a simulated teacher labor market that incorporates dynamic self-selection and Bayesian learning. Bonus policies create only modest...

This paper studies the labor supply contributions to individual and family earnings inequality during the period of rising wage inequality in the early 1980's. Working couples have positively correlated labor market outcomes, which are almost entirely attributable to permanent factors. An...