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...

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...

This paper presents an analysis of housing conditions amongst the British urban workingclass in 1904, using a re-discovered survey.1 We investigate overcrowding and we find majorregional differences...

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

Until now there have been no national estimates of the extent of poverty in Britain at the turnof the 20th century. This paper introduces a newly-discovered household budget data set forthe early 1900s. These data are more representative of urban working households in Britainin the period than...

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...

This paper presents and analyses the sharp increase in hourly wage inequality after 1998 inPoland. The increase was similar in magnitude to the much-studied increase in British wageinequality during the 1980s. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey, we find thisincrease to be associated...