Using nationally representative data from the NLSY97 and a simultaneous equations model, this paper analyzes the financial motivations for and the effects of employment on U.S. college students’ academic performance. The data confirm the predictions of the theoretical model that lower parental...

What role does self-employment play in the retirement process? Older Americans are staying in the labor force longer than prior trends would have predicted and many change jobs later in life. These job transitions are often within the same occupation or across occupations within wage-and-salary...

Workers who use computers earn more than those who do not. Is this a productivity effect or merely selection? Using the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey, we control for selection and find a wage premium of 3.8% for the average worker upon adopting a computer. This premium, however,...

I compare the behavior of job creation and job destruction over the past two economic downturns. Both periods have brief but sharp rises in job destruction followed by flat net job growth. The dynamics underlying these slow recoveries differ drastically. In 1991-92, job destruction is slow to...

Using the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey and controlling for individual and establishment fixed effects, we find that within a year of adopting a computer, the average worker earns a 3.6 percent higher wage than a similar worker who did not adopt a computer. Returns are even larger for...

This paper develops and tests a unique model of asymmetric employer learning. The model relaxes the informational assumptions used in most of the previous literature and assumes firms compete for workers through bidding wars. As a result, outside firms can profitably compete for an employed...

Airplanes were invented by hobbyists and experimenters, and some personal computers were as well. Similarly, many open-source software developers are interested in the software they make, and not focused on profit. Based on these cases, this paper has a model of agents called tinkerers who want...

The process of developing technology through open discussion has been called collective invention. Open source software projects have this form. This paper documents two earlier episodes of collective invention and proposes a general model based on search theory. One episode was the development...

This paper proposes a detailed, consistent category system for occupations in the Census of Population data from 1960 to 2000. Most of the categories are based on the 1990 Census occupation definitions. We analyze employment levels, average earnings levels, and earnings variance in our...

An ongoing debate surrounding BLS productivity data is that official labor productivity measures may be overstating productivity growth because of an increase in unmeasured hours worked outside the traditional workplace. This paper uses both the ATUS and May CPS Work Schedules and Work at Home...