Many workers reveal a preference for a gradual reduction in work hours as they approach retirement (?phased retirement?), rather than a sudden change from full-time work to full-time retirement. Pension regulations may impede phased retirement without a switch of employers by prohibiting access...

The conventional view is that Americans work longer hours than Germans and other Europeans but when time in household production is included, overall working time is very similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans spend more time on market work but German invest more in household...

Since the 1950s, there has been a steady decentralization of entry-level jobs towards the suburbs of American cities, while racial minorities ?and particularly blacks? have remained in city centers. In this context, the spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that because the residential locations of...

Alternative work arrangements (AWAs), such as contracting, consulting, and temporary work, have been criticized as providing only atypical, even precarious, employment. Yet they may also allow workers to locate suitable job matches. Exploiting data from all four Contingent and Alternative...

Do income disparities between men and women translate into longer term wealth disparities? We use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate gender and race disparities in home ownership, value, and equity. These investigations reveal that the gap in housing outcomes is...

This paper examines differences in educational achievement between immigrants and natives in ten countries with a high population of immigrant pupils: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. The first step of the analysis shows...

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers? hours are largely chosen at the worker?s discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in U.S. public schools over...

Research suggests that teenage childbearing adversely affects both the outcomes of the mothers as well as those of their children. We know that low-educated women are more likely to have a teenage birth, but does this imply that policies that increase educational attainment reduce early...

A large fraction of the variation in wage levels and wage growth rates among individuals remains unexplained. Economists argue that ?unobserved? heterogeneity is among the more likely reasons for this unexplained variation in wages. The source of individual heterogeneity is typically attributed...

In this paper we describe the hypothesis of effort-based career opportunities as a situation in which profit maximizing firms create incentives for employees to work longer hours than the bargained ones, by making career prospects dependent on working hours. When effortbased career opportunities...