An individual's human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched workerworkplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...

This note presents evidence of the following gender asymmetry: the job-finding effort of married men and women is affected by the income of their spouses in opposite directions. For women, spouse income influences job finding negatively, just as own wealth does: the more the man earns and the...

This paper studies the willingness to become an entrepreneur depending on an individual's composition of human and social capital. Our theoretical analysis is an application and extension of Lazear's (2005) jack-of-all-trades theory. Our primary implication is that it is not individuals with a...

This paper discusses the use of hedonic techniques to theoretically and empirically understand the wages of higher education faculty. The paper first presents theoretical models of department and faculty choice. These models represent a synthesis of prior work in the hedonic area. The models...

When labor incomes approach subsistence levels, the labor supply curve slopes outward, because the fight for survival mandates households to look for longer work hours in response to falling wage rates. We explore conditions under which near-subsistence scenarios may imply wage traps, labor...

There has long been a consensus that generous unemployment benefits probably raise unemployment rates. The link has been difficult to demonstrate, however, since existing indicators on the generosity of unemployment benefits overlook key aspects of the system that may influence worker response....

In this paper we analyze data for each Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) school on academic characteristics, athletic characteristics, and graduation rates. Three groups of athletes are studied: male football players, male basketball players, and female basketball...

We propose a theory to explain the choice between nominal and indexed labor contracts. We find that contracts should be indexed if prices are difficult to forecast and nominal otherwise. Our analysis is based on a principal-agent model developed by Jovanovic and Ueda (1997) in which...

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of job rotation as a mechanism with which the firm can learn about the employees' productivities and the profitability of different jobs or activities. I compare job rotation to an assignment policy where employees specialize in one job along their...