Regulation of the employment contract is both wide spread and diverse. The diversity of regulation is surprising because it suggests that there is little consensus regarding optimal intervention into the labor market. This paper discusses several economic reasons why it may be efficient for...

This paper develops a new efficient estimator for the average treatment effect, if selection for treatment is on observables. The new estimator is linear in the first-stage nonparametric estimator. This simplifies the derivation of the means squared error (MSE) of the estimator as a function of...

We explain the proliferation of panel data studies in terms of (i) data availability, (ii) the more heightened capacity for modeling the complexity of human behavior than a single cross-section or time series data can possibly allow, and (iii) challenging methodology. Advantages and issues of...

The U.S. economic development in the nineteenth century was characterized by the westward movement of population and the accumulation of productive land in the West. This paper presents a model of migration and land improvement to identify the quantitatively important forces driving this...

Among the rich economies of the world today, per capita output levels had diverged before converging to the per capita output level of the frontier economy. Since frontier economies have grown at stable rates, non-frontier economies display an S-shape aggregate transition path. Along this...

We analyze an agency model where one individual decides how much evidence he collects. We assume that he has free access to information, but all the news acquired become automatically public. Conditional on the information disclosed, a second individual with conflicting preferences undertakes an...

This paper studies nonstationarities in panels of exchange rates and interest rates. For this, we survey developments in the analysis of nonstationary panels with cross-sectional dependence modeled as a factor model. We focus on panel unit root tests and on inference on the nonstationary...

This paper studies qualitative properties of an optimal contract in a multi-agent setting in which agents are subject to a common shock. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal reward of an agent producing an output level y to be a decreasing (increasing) function of the...

In this paper we examine the long-term impact of legalized abortion on teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing in the United States using the birth data from the Vital Statistics of the U. S. Our fundamental argument is analogous to Donahue and Levitt’s (2001): by decreasing the number of unwanted...

During the first half of the 20th century the workweek in the United States declined, and the distribution of hours across wage deciles narrowed. At the same time, the distribution of wages narrowed too. The hypothesis proposed is (i) Households have access to an increasing number of leisure...