Despite indications that interpersonal interactions are important for understanding individual labor-market outcomes and have become more important over the last decades, there is little analysis by economists. This paper shows that interpersonal interactions are important determinants of...

The education reform movement includes efforts to raise teacher quality through stricter certification and licensing provisions. Most US states now require public school teachers to pass a standardized test such as the Praxis. Although any barrier to entry is likely to raise wages in the...

In this paper I discuss a structural problem facing the United States with respect to our policy responses in the context of trade and technological change and their impact on workers. Both trade and technological change have put enormous pressure on the U.S. economy to raise the skill level of...

The problem with most intergenerational mobility estimates is that unmeasured and inherited abilities prevent us from drawing inferences. In this paper we estimate the intergenerational mobility of schooling and exploit differences between adopted and own birth children to obtain genetically...

Many workers believe that personal contacts are crucial for obtaining jobs in high-wage sectors. On the other hand, firms in high-wage sectors report using employee referrals because they help provide screening and monitoring of new employees. This paper develops a matching model that can...

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect...

This paper examines the changing nature of views towards and reports of sexual harassment using unique data drawn from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) of the U.S. Federal Government over the period from 1978-1994. Our results indicate that while federal government employees...

After decades of stability, the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990?s. Which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy, and did searching for work on line help these workers...

The wage policy of a German and a U.S. firm is comparatively analysed with a focus on the relation between wages and hierarchies. While prior studies examine only one particular firm, in this paper two plants of the same owners with similar production processes in different institutional...

Although there is a sizeable literature of the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, there is a dearth of studies of the impact of school sector on nonacademic outcomes. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on the likelihood that...