Although economic models of training decisions are framed in terms of a company's calculation of the costs and benefits of such training, empirical work has never been able to test this model directly on company behavior. This paper utilizes a unique database to analyze the determinants of the...

This paper reports new evidence from a survey of over 408 U.S. employers concerning their use of temporary and on-call workers. More than 90 percent of responding organizations reported reliance on these flexible staffing arrangements. They accounted for an average of 1.5 percent of total labor...

Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, I conducted a randomized field experiment in fifty traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization in schools. Treatment schools altered their schedules to have teachers...

We summarize some of the early effects and discuss possible future effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession on the employment outcomes of older workers in the United States. We start by discussing what we know about how older workers faired in prior recessions in the United States and how...

Many major government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. In this paper, we shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA), a means-tested and state-administered...

This paper describes the development of population health and disability insurance utilization for older workers in Sweden and analyzes the relation between the two. We use three different measures of population health: (1) the mortality rate (measured between 1950 and 2009); (2) the prevalence...

This is the introduction and summary to the sixth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data to answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points, and...

Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...