Empirical studies of the aggregate labor market matching function have favored a Cobb-Douglas functional form, for which there are no microfoundations in the existing literature. I present a new model for the matching process, based on a "telephone-line" Poisson queuing process, which, unlike...

Public services can be, and are, delivered according to a variety of different arrangements. The public sector can finance and provide a service itself, or contract with the private sector to participate in provision, or its role may be limited to regulating a private provider. In this paper we...

Since the Industrial Training Act of 1964, the UK government has adopted a variety of policies intended to redress a problem of under-investment in vocational training. In the 1960s and 1970s it attempted to regulate the training provided by firms, through a levy scheme. More recently,...

Failure in the training market may result from credit constraints and other capital market imperfections, deterring potential trainees, or labour market imperfections creating external benefits for firms. This paper presents a model of a training market affected by both problems, and examines...

Training for skills that are transferable to other firms, but for which the external labor market is imperfectly competitive, cannot be analyzed using the traditional tools of general and specific training. It is known that firms (as well as workers) have an incentive to invest in such training...

Two sources of inefficiency in the provision of on-the-job training are examined: an externality between firms which arises if there is imperfect competition between firms in the labor market, and allocation inefficiency due to asymmetry of information about the value of the trained worker. The...

This paper explores the incentives faced by employers for supplying general training of the type given to craft apprentices. An investment model is developed in which the employer's return takes the form of reduced recruitment costs for skilled labor. An empirical model is derived and fitted to...

This article investigates the hypothesis that when measures of specific human capital (such as job tenure) are included in earnings functions, there may be a sample selection bias because of job-matching effectsbecause workers with high unobserved match quality receive and accept high wage...

A number of recent papers have found that certain measures of pollution worsen and later improve as income per head increases. It is widely believed that the downhill portion of this inverted-U curve reflects an induced policy response; that, as incomes rise, citizens demand improvements in...