Working as a volunteer is a widespread phenomenon that has both individual and societal benefits. In this paper, we identify the wage returns to working for free by exploiting exogenous variation in rainfall across local area districts in England, Scotland and Wales. Instrumental variables...

What are the sources of wage growth in developing countries? In the US, general labor market experience is the key source of wage growth, with job seniority playing a smaller role. By contrast, in Indonesia, the 10-year return to seniority is 24 to 29%, which is higher than the return to...

Survey and register data indicate that many employees prefer a socially responsible employer and will accept a lower wage to achieve this. Laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that socially responsible groups are more productive than others, partly because they attract cooperative...

Effective altruists wish to do good while optimizing the social performance they deliver. We apply this principle to the labor market. We determine the optimal occupational choice of a socially motivated worker who has two mutually exclusive options: a job with a for-profit firm and a lower-paid...

Analyzing the self-selection of workers into formal and informal sector employment in Tajikistan, a poor transition economy, with higher informal sector than formal sector wages and an informal sector employment share exceeding 50 percent, we find that the selection of formal and informal sector...

This study considers those wage earners who are covered by a social security program as part of the formal sector and those wage earners who are not covered by any social security program as part of the informal sector. Using 1994 Household Expenditure Survey, I first examine how individuals are...

We consider a continuum of workers ranked according to their abilities to acquire education and two firms with different technologies that imperfectly compete in wages to attract these workers. Once employed, each worker bears an education cost proportional to his/her initial ability, this cost...

After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations and expanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized in the 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading to a...