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...

We study how transition has affected human resource policies of a Russian heavy industry firm. Our data set contains personnel files of 1538 white-collar workers over 17 years: from 1984 to 2000. We find career paths before the first year of Gaidar's reforms, 1992, when Russian transition to a...

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...

We study the allocation and productivity consequences of training production line supervisors in soft skills via a randomized controlled trial. Consistent with standard practice for training investments within firms, we asked middle managers -- who sit above supervisors in the hierarchy -- to...

The impact of the pandemic on the employment, labor supply, and caregiving of women is assessed. Compared with previous recessions, that induced by COVID-19 impacted women's employment and labor force participation more relative to men. But the big divide was less between men and women than it...

Using College and Beyond data and a variant on Dale and Krueger's (2002) matched-applicant approach, this paper revisits the question of how attending an elite college affects later-life outcomes. We expand the scope along two dimensions: we examine new outcomes related to labor force...

The career and family outcomes of college graduate women suggest that the twentieth century contained five distinct cohorts.' Each cohort made choices concerning career and family subject to different constraints. The first cohort, graduating college from the beginning of the twentieth century...

Despite considerable gender convergence over time, substantial gender inequality persists in all countries. Using Danish administrative data from 1980-2013 and an event study approach, we show that most of the remaining gender inequality in earnings is due to children. The arrival of children...

We consider the role that workplace attributes play in accounting for the divergence in the careers of women and men, with the onset of parenthood. We exploit matched employer-employee data from Sweden to characterize a model-based index of workplace "family friendliness" and analyze the effect...

In many professional service firms, new associates work long hours while competing in up-or-out promotion contests. Our model explores why these firms require young professionals to take on heavy workloads while simultaneously facing significant risks of dismissal. We argue that the productivity...