Neoclassical labor market theories imply that employers will react to binding minimum wages by changing the level of employment. A multitude of studies consider this aspect of minimum wages, yet fail to reach a consensus as to its employment effects. While the employment effects of the minimum...

This paper examines nonsequential search when jobs vary with respect to nonpecuniary characteristics. In the presence of frictions in the labor market, the equilibrium job distribution need not show evidence of compensating wage differentials. The model also generates several pervasive features...

Economists have examined the impact of labor market regulations on the level of employment. However, there are many reasons to suspect that the impact of regulations differs across types of workers. In this paper we take advantage of the unusual large variance in labor policy in Chile to exa...

We have used a unique longitudinal database that incorporates information from diverse administrative and research sources to examine the impact of the early stages of welfare reform on poor working families who do not receive cash assistance. Our data are for 2791 working poor families from...

This paper examines cross-country differences in labour policies and practices and employee performance and attitudes toward work from a sample of nearly 30,000 employees in a large multinational manufacturing firm. The analysis shows: 1) large establishment and country differences in work...

Using data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates and a sample of Harvard alumnae, we study the relationship between work environment and the labor force participation of mothers. We first document a large variation in labor force participation rates across high-education fields....

This paper studies the effect of mothers' education on fertility in a population with very low female labor force participation. The results we present are particularly relevant to many countries in the Muslim world where 70-80 percent of women are still out of the labor force. For...

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. suffrage laws, we show that exposure to suffrage during childhood led to...

This paper analyzes the connection between two concurrent trends since 1950: the narrowing and reversal of the educational gender gap and the increased labor force participation rate (LFPR) of married women. We hypothesize that the education production for boys is more adversely affected by a...