There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision towork in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as apuzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee.Information on income...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12043-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Firms hiring new graduates face uncertainty on the future productivity of workers. Theory suggests that starting wages reflect this, with lower pay for greater uncertainty. We use the dispersion of exam grades within a field of education as an...</p>

It is argued that migration from Mexico to the US and its corresponding return migration aredetermined by international wage differentials and preferences for origin. We use a model ofjob search, savings and migration to show that job turnover is a crucial determinant of themigration process...

Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we show both theoretically and empirically that positiveassortative matching between firms...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of thelabor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate along run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct forendogeneity in the...