We study the role of cognitive ability for individuals’ tax responsiveness using linked administrative tax and military enlistment registers. Our main finding is that individuals in the top decile of the ability distribution react twice as strong to a large and salient kink point in the...

This chapter provides a comprehensive expository survey and synthesis of the theoretical determinants of migration. Early work beginning with Adam Smith, running through the pioneering research of Larry Sjaastad in the 1960s, and continuing through the end of the twentieth century established...

The positive correlation between hourly wages and height, which results in higher labor supply of tall individuals, is well-documented in the literature. Accepting the utilitarian perspective and assuming that height does not affect utility implies that linking income taxes to height is welfare...

Estimates of labor supply elasticities can be sensitive to the source of identifying variation. This paper's model of production complementarities helps to interpret conflicting evidence. Complementarities attenuate working time adjustments to idiosyncratic, or individual-specific, variation in...

Relative pay — earnings compared with the earnings of others doing a similar job, or compared with one's earnings in the past — affects how much individuals would like to work (labor supply) and their effort on the job; it therefore has implications for both employers and policy makers. A...

The purpose of this note is to explore the problem of a non-convex labor supply decision in an economy with unobservable e ort and incentive ("fair") wages a la Danthine and Kurmann (2004), and explicitly perform the aggregation presented there without a formal proof, and thus provide - starting...

The purpose of this note is to describe the lottery- and insurance-market equilibrium in an economy with non-convex labor supply decision, unobservable effort, and incentive ("fair") wages. The presence of indivisible labor creates a market incompleteness, which requires that an insurance market...

There is substantial variation in working time even within employer-employee matches, and yet estimates of the Frisch elasticity of labor supply can be near zero. This paper proposes a tractable theory of earnings and working time to interpret these observations. Production complementarities...

In the present paper an empirical analysis with a panel data econometric model will point out that R&D, government spending on education as well as trade unions are the most important factors for the labor productivity determination. The sample examined covers many Western European countries....

We analyze the impact on a firm's profits and optimal wage rates, and on the distribution of workers' earnings, when workers compare their earnings with those of co-workers. We consider a low-productivity worker who receives lower wage earnings than a high-productivity worker. When the...