In the Dutch Postcode Lottery a postal code (19 households on average) is randomly selected weekly, and prizes - consisting of cash and a new BMW - are awarded to lottery participants living in that postal code. On average, this generates a temporary, unexpected income shock equal to about eight...

We study firms' advertised preferences for gender, age, height and beauty in a sample of ads from a Chinese internet job board, and interpret these patterns using a simple employer search model. We find that these characteristics are widely and highly valued by Chinese employers, though...

In labor markets, the ratchet effect refers to a situation where workers subject to performance pay choose to restrict their output, because they rationally anticipate that firms will respond to higher output levels by raising output requirements or cutting pay. We model this effect as a...

We introduce international mobility of knowledge workers into a model of Nash equilibrium IPR policy choice among countries. We show that governments have incentives to use IPRs in a bidding war for global talent, resulting in Nash equilibrium IPRs that can be too high, rather than too low, from...

We consider the welfare effects of the emigration of workers who produce a public good (knowledge). We distinguish between the knowledge diversion and knowledge creation effects of such emigration, and show that the remaining residents of a country can gain from emigration, even when tastes for...

We document how explicit employer requests for applicants of a particular gender enter the recruitment process on a Chinese job board. Overall, we find that 19 out of 20 callbacks to jobs requesting a particular gender are of the requested gender. Mostly, this is because application pools to...

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers' hours are largely chosen at the worker's discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in U.S. public schools over...

We study urban, private sector Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local permanent residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board. We find that these employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's...

When permitted by law, employers sometimes state the preferred age and gender of their employees in job ads. We study the interaction of advertised requests for age and gender on one Mexican and three Chinese job boards, showing that firms' explicit gender requests shift dramatically away from...

Using Census and Current Population Survey data spanning 1959 through 1999, we assess the relative contributions of two factors to the decline in the gender wage gap: changes across cohorts in the relative slopes of men%u2019s and women%u2019s age-earnings profiles, versus changes in relative...