Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics...

With the beginnings of a worldwide burgeoning development of matched firm-employee data, it is worthwhile to examine the possibilities for using these data. This essay discusses a variety of areas in which some progress has been made and presents ideas for future research in a number of others,...

The U.S. labor market experienced a more than 20 percent reduction in the share of workers holding multiple jobs over the past 20 years. While this substantial trend is receiving increasing attention, the literature lacks a comprehensive picture of the gross worker flows that underlie the...

This paper documents that rotation group bias – the tendency for labor force statistics to vary systematically by month in sample in labor force surveys – in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has worsened considerably over time. The estimated unemployment rate for earlier rotation groups...

Hours worked is an important economic indicator. In addition to being a measure of labor utilization, average weekly hours are inputs into measures of productivity and hourly wages, which are two key economic indicators. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' two hours series tell very...

This paper looks behind the standard, publicly available employment and unemployment statistics that studies of transition economy labor markets have typically relied upon. We analyze microdata on detailed labor force survey responses in Russia, Romania, and Estonia to measure nonstandard,...

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are...

In this paper the hypothesis that partnerships between immigrants and natives are less specialized - in the sense that spouses provide similar working hours per weekday - than those between immigrants is tested. The empirical analysis relies on panel data using a two-limit random effects tobit...

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which...