In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings aredistributed across the population. In the years since Mincer’s seminal work, he as well as hisstudents and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching importantconclusions about a whole array...

In this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980sin the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper relating to the UK.Data on random samples of twenty million US workers are examined taken from the BasicMonthly files of the CPS...

In this paper we empirically examine differences in search behavior between men andwomen. We assess hypotheses regarding duration of search, wages and tenure. Thehypotheses are derived from two models: the equilibrium search model with discriminatoryfirms by Black (1995) and an opportunity cost...

Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were made to test for age discrimination inhiring. A twenty-one year-old and a thirty-nine year-old woman applied for jobs where a newgraduate was sought; men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired about employmentas waiters; women aged...

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

We estimate the earnings premium for beauty in an occupation where returns to physical attractiveness are likely to be important: commercial sex work. In the commercial sex market, perhaps more so than any other sector in the labor market, the beauty premium should be at the extreme due to the...

In a laboratory experiment, we show that subjects incorporate irrelevant group information into their evaluations of individuals. Individuals from on average worse performing groups receive lower evaluations, even if they are known to perform equally well as individuals from better performing...

We investigate the emergence of discrimination in an experiment where individuals affiliated to different groups compete for a monetary prize, submitting independent bids to an auctioneer. The auctioneer receives perfect information about the bids (i.e. there is no statistical discrimination),...

The standard correspondence testing experiment does not identify whether employer prejudice drives discriminatory behavior when hiring. This article proposes a new methodology using geographic variation to explore the link between employer attitudes toward ethnic minorities and the ethnic...

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic and religious diversity on the quality of public spaces. Its identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of public housing allocations in France, and thereby eliminates the bias from endogenous sorting. The paper uses micro evidence of social...