Atypical work, or alternative work arrangements in U.S. parlance, has long been criticized for providing poorly-compensated employment. Although one group of atypical workers (contractors) seems to enjoy a wage premium, our cross-section results from the CPS and NLSY for the better-known...

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we assess the role of employment-based health insurance offers in explaining the motherhood wage gap. Researchers have been aware of the existence of a motherhood gap for many years; yet, the literature has failed to address the...

This paper exploits temporal and spatial variation in the implementation of US sick pay mandates to assess their labor market consequences. We use the Synthetic Control Group Method (SCGM) and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) to estimate the causal effect of mandated sick...

"We examine the effects of employment-contingent health insurance on married women's labor supply following a health shock. First, we develop a theoretical model that examines the effects of employment-contingent health insurance on the labor supply response to a health shock, to clarify under...

This study shows that the wage premium paid by large firms fell over the past 20 years and that the decline in the size premium has been most pronounced among the least educated work force. Empirical evidence supports several explanations for the decline in the size premium. First, there has...

We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980's. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...

This paper examines trends in the college wage premium (CWP) by birth cohort across the five major household surveys in the United States: the Census/ACS, CPS, NLSY, PSID, and SIPP. We document a flattening in the CWP for birth cohorts 1978 and onward in each survey and even a decline for birth...

Indicators for quality of schooling are not only relatively new in the world but also unavailable for a sizable share of the world's population. In their absence, some proxy measures have been devised. One simple but powerful idea has been to use the schooling premium for migrant workers in the...

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs. We develop a simple methodology to test predictions implied by OJS using two sources of identification: (i) time-variation in job-finding rates and (ii) the time since the last...