This paper presents new tests of the permanent income hypothesis and other widely used models of household behavior using data from the labor market. We estimate the excess sensitivity of job search behavior to cash-on-hand using sharp discontinuities in eligibility for severance pay and...

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that...

We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present...

Many households devote a large fraction of their budgets to "consumption commitments"-goods that involve transaction costs and are infrequently adjusted. This paper characterizes risk preferences in an expected utility model with commitments. We show that commitments affect risk preferences in...

This paper analyzes the effects of dividend taxation on corporate behavior using the large tax cut on individual dividend income enacted in 2003. We document a 20 percent increase in dividend payments by nonfinancial, nonutility publicly traded corporations following the tax cut. An unusually...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit into four subintervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a...

Health insurance characteristics shift at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. We measure the impacts of these changes on patients who are admitted to hospitals through emergency departments for conditions with similar admission rates on weekdays and weekends. The age profiles of...

This paper describes a simple model of labor disputes based on the hypothesis that unions use strikes to infer the profitability of the firm. The model posits the existence of a negatively sloped resistance curve between wages and strike duration. In addition, it offers a series of predictions...

Schelling ("Dynamic Models of Segregation," Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971), 143-186) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a "tipping point," all the whites leave. We use regression...

Although the college-high school wage gap for younger U. S. men has doubled over the past 30 years, the gap for older men has remained nearly constant. In the United Kingdom and Canada the college-high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men. Using a model with imperfect...