Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive...

While there is consensus on the need to raise the time spent in the market by European women, it is not clear how these goals should be achieved. Tax wedges, assistance in the job search process, and part-time jobs are policy instruments that are widely debated in policy circles. The paper...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previous papers,...

This paper proposes a matching model that distinguishes between job creation by existing firms and job creation by firm entrants. The paper argues that vacancy posting and job destruction on the extensive margin, i.e. from firms that enter and exit the labour market, represents a viable...

Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...

Our econometric research allows for a possible response of a person's hours worked to hours typically worked by members of a multidimensional labor market reference group that considers demographics and geographic location. Instrumental variables estimates of the canonical labor supply model...

When a society overthrows a ruler – call the ruler Caesar – what determines whether Caesar is killed or enslaved? This paper presents a model of killing versus enslaving Caesar, based on a new theory which unifies justice, status, and power. The model pertains to societies which value...

The “prospect of upward mobility” (POUM) hypothesis formalised by Benabou and Ok (2001a) finds explicit assumptions under which some individuals that are poorer than the average optimally choose to oppose redistribution policies. The underlying intuition is that these individuals rationally...

In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study,...