In an efficient household if the spouses' time inputs are perfect substitutes, then spouses will "specialize" regardless of their preferences and the governance structure. That is, both spouses will not allocate time to both household production and the market sector. The perfect substitutes...

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility and children's living circumstances during...

Do potential entrepreneurs remain in wage employment because of concerns that they will face worse job opportunities should their entrepreneurial ventures fail? Using a Canadian reform that extended job-protected leave to one year for women giving birth after a cutoff date, we study whether the...

The rise of the “gig economy” has attracted wide attention from both scholars and the popular media. Much of this attention has been devoted to jobs mediated through various online platforms. While non-traditional work arrangements have been a perennial subject of debate and study, the...

This paper studies how individuals "believe" human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at...

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. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success,...

A growing theoretical and empirical literature shows that public recognition can lead employees to exert greater effort. However, status competition is also associated with excessive expenditure on status goods, greater likelihood of bankruptcy, and more risk taking by money managers. This paper...

In a labor market hierarchy, promotions are affected by the noisiness of information about the candidates. I study the hypothesis that males are more risk taking than females, and its implications for rates of promotion and abilities of survivors. I define promotion hierarchies with and without...

Caspi et al. (2002, 2003), Guo et al. (2008a), and Pescosolido et al. (2008) all claim to have demonstrated allele-by-environment interactions, but in all cases environmental influences are potentially endogenous to the unmeasured genetic characteristics of the subjects and their families. Thus,...