Large-scale pension reforms can have redistributive wage effects across generations and education groups when the labour market suffers from skill mismatch. A quasi-experimental ‘retirement shock’ in Ukraine illustrates the effect of labour scarcity on wage growth and returns to education:...

High-tenure workers losing their job experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with (i) on-the-job search, (ii) general human...

This paper investigates the six-fold increase in student enrollment and three-fold increase in degree completions at for-profit colleges over the last two decades. In particular, we examine the hypothesis that for-profit colleges have more flexibility to respond to market changes, attracting...

We estimate a dynamic model of schooling on two cohorts of the NLSY and find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the effects of real (as opposed to relative) family income on education have practically vanished between the early 1980's and the early 2000's. After conditioning on a cognitive...

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained.

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels that do not vary across states. For example, moral hazard and matching considerations may make it cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing,...

We propose a model in which, as incomes grow, workers become less risk-averse and move from fixed-wage contracts to variable pay. This can explain the recent increase in wage dispersion between groups, within groups, and over the lifecycle.

This paper analyses problems of labor market adjustments to occupational safety and health (OSH) hazards. It also presents analytical models for the eventual measurement and empirical analyses of factors effecting the level of OSH hazards in the workplace. This study does not pretend to deal...