Job mobility, especially early in a career, is an important source of wage growth. This effect is typically attributed to heterogeneity in the quality of employee-employer matches, with individuals learning of their abilities and discovering the tasks at which they are most productive through...

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information....

This paper offers an eclectic survey of the political economy of labor regulation in the United States at federal and state levels along the dimensions of occupational health and safety, unjust dismissal, right-to-work, workplace safety and workers’ compensation, living wages, and prevailing...

This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and service sectors. Reflecting current preoccupations, our...

Although the adverse labor market effects of economic recessions have been well documented, a notable omission in the literature is how recessions impact workers' job match quality. This paper considers the short and longer-term losses in productivity associated with the job changing brought in...

The demographic transition -the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime- is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake. To study demographic transitions across time and space, we compile a data set of birth and death...

At first blush, most advances in labour demand were achieved by the late 1980s. Since then progress might appear to have stalled. We argue to the contrary that significant progress has been made in understanding labour market frictions and imperfections, and in modelling search behaviour and...

Just as the standard two-way fixed effects model for estimating the impact of minimum wages on employment has been sharply criticized for its neglect of spatial heterogeneity so, too, have the latest models been attacked for their uncritical use of state- or county-specific linear trends (and...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...

The total fertility rate is well below its replacement level of 2.1 children in high-income countries. Why do women choose such low fertility levels? We study how labor market frictions affect the fertility of college-educated women. We focus on two frictions: uncertainty created by dual labor...