The demands on a person's time vary over their working life, so that the years in which they might be expected to devote most time to work may also be the period when other commitments, such as bringing up children, are most pressing. Estimates of the intertemporal labor supply elasticity that...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies' exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the...

Consider a principal who appoints an agent. Let the agent potentially serve for a sufficiently long time that one principal is replaced by another over this period. Suppose also that the quality of the agent appointed increases with the effort the incumbent principal devotes to hiring. Then the...

To gain a better understanding of how fluctuations in output influence firms' decision to hire temporary workers, the authors examine the relationship between output volatility and the use of temporary labor. They find that, all things being equal, temporary employment is higher in states with...

Using a revealed preference approach applied to administrative data from Washington we document that workers have limited discretion over hours at a given employer, there is substantial mismatch between workers who prefer long hours and employers that provide short hours, and hour constraints...

The existing literature suggests that the concern for economic efficiency calls for individual taxation of married couples with a higher rate on the primary earner. This paper reconsiders the choice of tax unit in the Becker model of household production, which includes previous analyses as...

We analyse the effects of retirement of one partner on home production by both partners in a couple. Using longitudinal data from Germany on couples, we control for fixed household specific effects to address the concern that retirement decisions are correlated with unobserved characteristics...

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower wellbeing emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic...

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower wellbeing emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic...

Optimal taxes for Europe and the U.S. are derived in a realistically calibrated model in which agents buy consumption goods and services and use home capital and labor to produce household services. The optimal tax rate on services is substantially lower than the tax rate on goods. Specifically,...