Supervisory and monitoring costs are explored to understand aspects of occupational segregation by sex. Around the turn of this century 47 percent of all female manufacturing operatives were paid by the piece, but only 13 percent of the males were. There were very few males and females employed...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to understand the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs and quality. Our review reveals...

What is the socially optimal level of liquidity in a retirement savings system? Liquid retirement savings are desirable because liquidity enables agents to flexibly respond to pre-retirement events that raise the marginal utility of consumption. On the other hand, pre-retirement liquidity is...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: Are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

Women in developed economies have made major inroads in labor markets throughout the past century, but remaining gender differences in pay and employment seem remarkably persistent. This paper documents long-run trends in female employment, working hours and relative wages for a wide...

Although women make up nearly half the U.S. workforce, most studies of earnings inequality focus on men. This is at least in part because of the complexity of modeling both the decision to work (i.e., the extensive margin) and the level of earnings conditional on work (the intensive margin). In...

Using longitudinal data on marriage and children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1967 to 2016, we characterize women's exposure to the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) during their first two decades of adulthood. We use measures of this exposure to estimate the...

We explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional relationships between marriage, motherhood, and wages. We find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the quot;directquot; effects of marriage and motherhood on wages (i.e., effects net of experience and...

We use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women. This analysis yields evidence of biases in OLS estimates of wage equations for white and black women, some of which are detected only when these two sources of bias are...