This paper develops a theoretical model of the inequality in wages and salaries associated with differences in years of schooling (educational inequality, for short). Our model assumes that in the long run individual decisions to become more educated equalize the lifetime earnings of more...

Joan Robinson first suggested that the labor supply curve for a firm may be upward sloping with a finite wage elasticity. Recently, a rapidly growing volume of microeconomics studies have found empirical support for Robinson's suggestion. In this paper it is shown that if a firm's wage...

We analyze how the top firms and managers from one market (industry or country) would compete with those from another, to develop an integrated market for talent. In our competitive matching model, in two distinct markets talent has general and market-specific human capital (GHC and M-SHC)...

Perfect competition implies stage two production for labor, where increased employment lowers productivity and decreased employment increases productivity. In contrast, empirical studies of individual firms and macroeconomic studies of the business cycle have document pro-cyclical productivity....

This paper has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the paper develops six mobility concepts and their measures as well...

Wage inequality in Portugal has increased over the last thirty years, with two distinct periods. The period from 1984 to the mid-90s witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes were at the core of this...

This paper reviews the literature on two-sided atomeless assignment models of workers to tasks. Using simple parametric examples, the fundamental differences between the comparative advantage and the scale of operations models are illustrated. Holding the distributions of abilities and tasks and...

In very different fields of economics, economic inference and policy evaluation require economists to parametrize a production function that links measures of input factors to measures of output. While doing so, strong assumptions are implicitly made about microeconomic variables governing the...

This study compares the estimation errors of several present value discounting conventions (end-of-year, mid-year, and the more recently proposed harmonic mean convention) for a uniform distribution of intra-period cash flow - continuous and discrete. Our results show that the mid-year...

This chapter summarizes what has been learned from recent research on intergenerational transmission of earnings status. The chapter begins by using a simple theoretical model to highlight several key concepts. Then it reviews (and discusses the connections among) three related empirical...