Standard economic models which focus on pecuniary payoffs cannot explain why there are highly able individuals who choose careers with low pecuniary returns. Therefore, financial incentives are unlikely to be effective in influencing career choices of these individuals. Based on Akerlof and...

The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of...

Our goal in this paper is to focus on highly educated men and women and try to explore the trade-offs between family and working career in Spain, where changes in female behavior with respect to the labor market have been relatively recent but rather important. We compare male and female...

This paper investigates earnings differentials between immigrants and natives. We focus on returns and on the (imperfect) international transferability of human capital. Data are drawn from the 2009 Italian Labour Force Survey (LFS). We show that returns to human capital are considerably lower...

This paper analyzes the long-term effects of graduating in a recession on earnings, job mobility, and employer characteristics for a large sample of Canadian college graduates using matched university-employer-employee data from 1982 to 1999. The results are used to assess the role of job...

We examined the liability-of-foreignness (LOF) hypothesis for immigrant and native job seekers by analyzing a national dataset that tracks their use of job-search methods and their associated job outcomes in the Canadian labor market. To our knowledge this is the first empirical test of LOF at...

In this paper, we estimate a structural model of choice of field of study by community college students. We use data from the Canadian Survey of Graduates for 12,871 individuals who successfully completed their programs in Canadian community colleges (CEGEPs in Quebec) in 1990 and 1995. Over...

There is a concern that ordered responses on health questions may differ across populations or even across subgroups of a population. This reporting heterogeneity may invalidate group comparisons and measures of health inequality. This paper proposes a test for differential reporting in ordered...