We examine the earnings determinants of the self-employed and wage earners in Hungary in the mid-1990's, taking into account two forms of selection: selection into working or nonworking for every individual in our sample and selection into self-employment or wageearning jobs for workers only....

After reviewing the literature on item non-response we focus on three issues: First, is there significant heterogeneity in item non-response across financial questions and in the association of covariates with item non-response across outcomes? Second, can the informational value of surveys be...

Recent welfare reforms are prompting some state and local welfare agencies to use temporary help service firms to help place welfare recipients into jobs. Concerns have arisen that these jobs are more likely to pay low wages, provide fewer benefits, and offer less stability. We explore the...

Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher...

We develop a simple human capital model for optimum schooling length when earnings are stochastic, and highlight the pivotal role of risk attitudes and the schooling gradient of earnings risk. We use Spanish data to document the gradient and to estimate individual response to earnings risk in...

Little is known about the informal sector's income structure vis-à-vis the formal sector, despite its predominant economic weight in developing countries. While most of the papers on this topic are drawn from (emerging) Latin American, Asian or some African countries, Madagascar represents an...

Contrary to previous findings, we find a systematic and economically sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy in a panel dataset of 197 countries over 213 years. By itself, GDP/capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve...

U.S. income inequality has risen dramatically in recent decades. Researchers consistently find that greater income inequality measured at the state or national level is associated with diminished subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. We conduct the first multi-scale analysis (i.e., at the...

In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents' goals in life, they should easily find ways to...

This paper concerns the prediction of career success among migrants. We focus specifically on the role of occupation as a mediating variable between the predictor variables education and time since migration, and the dependent variable career success as denoted by occupational status, linked to...