This article treats education as a sequential choice that is made under uncertainty. A simple model is used to explore the effects of ability, high school preparation, preferences for schooling, the borrowing rate, and ex post payoffs to college on the probability of various postsecondary...

This article investigates the effect of external, national, and sectoral shocks on Canadian employment fluctuations at the national, industrial, and provincial levels. The authors assume that employment growth in each industry-province pair depends on U.S. growth; lagged Canadian growth at the...

In a labor market with tied hours-wage packages and wage dispersion for a partic ular type of job, constrained workers may be willing to sacrifice wag e gains for better hours when changing jobs. Likewise, workers may ac cept jobs offering undesirable hours only if the associated wage gain s are...

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. The current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites, and...

The employer-learning literature finds support for statistical discrimination on the basis of schooling. How economically relevant statistical discrimination is depends on how fast employers learn about workers’ productive types. This article is the first to estimate the speed of employer...