Without long panel structures, the persistence of individual income risks cannot be identified. In this paper, we derive bounds on age-profile persistence levels with short panels where there are only 2-year panel structures. These bounds remarkably capture a low persistence in the early ages...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income shocks. We...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

Investing in human capital increases lifetime income, but these investments may involve substantial risk. In this paper we use a Finnish panel spanning 22 years to predict the mean, the variance and the skew of the present value of lifetime income, and to calculate certainty equivalent lifetime...

Little is known about how workers update expectations about job search and earnings when exposed to labor market news. To identify the impact of news on expectations, I exploit Foxconn’s unexpected announcement to build a manufacturing plant in Racine County. Exposure to positive news leads to...

I show that workers update expectations about job search and salary growth when exposed to labor market news. To identify the impact of news on expectations, I exploit Foxconn's announcement to build a large production plant in Racine County, Wisconsin. Exposure to positive news leads to an...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

Using data from social security records on Spanish males, we investigate the wage effects of working under a fixed-term contract. In a first step, we provide fixed-effects estimates of the wage effect of working under a fixed-term contract for low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled men...

We show that two models of the labor market, a Walrasian model and a labor contracting model, both have an approximate dynamic factor structure. We use this result to motivate our empirical approach to estimating the cyclical properties of real wages, which does not impose any structure between...

We present a new method for imposing and testing concavity of a cost function using asymptotic least squares, which can easily be implemented even for cost functions which are nonlinear in parameters. We provide an illustration on the basis of a (generalized) Box-Cox cost function with six...