This article challenges the widespread notion that spanning recognized categories, or generalism,is disadvantageous. In markets, buyers face the fundamental challenge of gaining insight into the underlying ability of sellers. Economic sociologists rely on theories of categorization to explain...

The Navy’s promotion-retention process involves two successive decisions: The Navy decides whether an individual is selected for promotion, and then, conditional on the Navy’s decision, the sailor decides whether to reenlist or leave the Navy. Rates of promotion and retention...

Many people do not purchase products that would appear to benefit them. For example, the price of an efficient cookstove can be less than a few months’ savings on fuel. If liquidity constraints, present bias, and poor information on fuel savings and stove durability are barriers, then...

Between 1980 and 2010 California’s health care policy field shifted from a business-dominated, closed-door pattern of decision making to an open political arena in which a wide-ranging and diversely resourced coalition advocating on behalf of beneficiaries had become an accepted partner...

Between 1980 and 2010 California’s health care policy field shifted from a business-dominated, closed-door pattern of decision making to an open political arena in which a wide-ranging and diversely resourced coalition advocating on behalf of beneficiaries had become an accepted partner...

We study copyright law and its relationship with cultural conceptions of authorship and technicalconstraints on the economics of publishing in the US. Because American copyright law was first developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we focus on that time period. And because...

To date, researchers have been very attentive to how the stigma of criminality informs employers’ hiring decisions, and, in the process, diminishes the employment opportunities afforded to jobseekers so stigmatized. Few researchers, however, have investigated the extent to which criminal...

I examine the phenomenon of occupational agglomeration – the observation that workers with similar skills tend to co-locate geographically. Extant explanations point to the fact that industries also tend to agglomerate – thereby creating a need for a particular type of employee to...

Traditional estimates of minimum wage effects include controls for state unemployment rates and state and year fixed-effects. Using CPS data on teens for the period 1990 – 2009, we show that such estimates fail to account for heterogeneous employment patterns that are correlated with...

Why is economic growth so slow and why are we having jobless recoveries? I address these questions here by revisiting Okun’s Law, focusing not just on its cyclical component but also upon its implied estimates of trend growth. Some observers argue that the rising strength of management...