After three years in college, football players face a trade-off between spending more time in college and pursuing a career in the National Football League (NFL). We analyze the salaries for rookies in the NFL and instrument the endogenous decision to enter the professional market with the month...

Poaching externality, arising from job-to-job turnovers, implies that a planner should allocate fewer resources to costly job creations. However, these search efforts increase competition among employers, and this could in turn internalize the externality, whereas the congestion externality...

This paper examines effects of schooling on wages instrumenting for individual schooling using cohort-level maternal schooling from previous censuses. Results suggest that an additional year of schooling increases hourly wages by 10 percent for men and 12.6 percent for women.

We investigate the relationship between an individuals’ reservation wage and unemployment in the local area district. Largely unexplored in the literature this adds to the work which has examined the association between employee wages and unemployment—the ‘wage curve’.

This paper disentangles the effect of inequality in permanent and transitory wages on hours worked by, first, estimating the two components for Swedish industries and, second, using the resulting estimates as explanatory variables in an hours-worked equation. Consistent with Bell and Freeman’s...

This study examines whether task-specific jobs are rewarded differently across establishments of different sizes and whether these rewards vary across distinct technologies. We found that the aggregate premium estimates on the impact of size on wages conceal significant differences between tasks...

The existing superstar model (Rosen, 1981) does not require imperfect substitutes, and the convexity of total earnings with respect to talent is due to greater output for those with more talent. Our model explains why wages would increase at an increasing rate in talent. Imperfect...

We document a strong trend towards more positive assortative wage sorting using Danish Matched Employer–Employee data from 1980 to 2006. The pattern is not due to compositional changes in the labor market and primarily occurs among high wage workers.

When players compete repeatedly, prizes won in earlier contests may improve the players’ abilities in later contests. This paper determines the allocation of prizes within and across contests that maximizes the (weighted) sum of aggregate efforts.

In this paper, the effects of capital income taxation on wage formation are studied using OECD data. The results indicate that a rise in the tax rate on capital income will reduce real wages and increase employment.