This paper is an econometric investigation of the choice of individuals between a number of occupation groupings utilising an extensive array of conditioning variables measuring a variety of aspects of individual heterogeneity. Whilst the model contains the main theory of occupational choice,...

In modern societies, people are often classified as White Collar or Blue Collar workers: that classification not only informs social scientists about the kind of work that they do, but also about their social standing, their social interests, their family ties, and their approach to life in...

This article proposes a simultaneous probit equation framework to analyse the business ownership patterns of married couples in the United States. A structural model of knowledge spillovers within couples is formulated and estimated. Empirical analysis reveals significant and substantial...

This paper employs United States Census data to study the occupational allocation of immigrants. The data reveal that the occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grown drastically in regional labor markets over the period 1980 to 2000. We examine the extent to which this growth can be...

Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete-choice, finite-horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross-country differences in the relative success of players. While we find...

This paper tests a central implication of the theory of equalizing differences, that workers sort into jobs with different attributes based on their preferences for those attributes. We present evidence from four new time-use data sets for the United States and France on whether workers who are...

This paper investigates whether risk preferences explain how individuals are sorted into occupations with different earnings variability. We exploit data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which contains a subjective assessment of willingness to take risks whose behavioral relevance has been...

Cross-sectional tests of the Jack-of-All-Trades theory of entrepreneurship invariably conclude that accumulation of balanced skill-mix across different fields of expertise stimulates entrepreneurship. Yet, none of these considers individual unobservable characteristics which may simultaneously...