"The book collects articles published by Daniel Hamermesh between 1969 and 2013 dealing with the general topic of the 'demand for labor'. The first section presents empirical studies of basic issues in labor demand, including the extent to which different types of labor are substitutes, how...

The Cold War division of Korea, regarded as a natural experiment in institutional change, provides a unique opportunity to examine whether institutions affect social preferences. We recruited North Korean refugees and South Korean students to conduct laboratory experiments eliciting social...

Does single motherhood adversely affect infant health? This question is not easy to answer because of the endogeneity of coresidence during pregnancy. In this paper, we exploit quasi-natural variation in single motherhood from the moment of conception to that of birth arising from marriageable...

We examine college students' interaction within classrooms and estimate peer effects on their academic performance. We exploit a unique seating rule at a university in South Korea, known as the fixed-seat system. We propose a novel identification strategy based on students' repeated interaction....

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance – in favour of boys – across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain...

South Korea has boasted one of the world's most successful economies since the end of World War II. The South Korean labor market has recovered quickly from the depths of the Asian crisis in 1998, and has since remained surprisingly sound and stable. The unemployment rate has remained relatively...

Abstract This paper examines whether viewers of the popular television show, American Idol, exhibit racial preferences. We find evidence on same-race preferences among black viewers only: when there are more black contestants in the show, more black viewers are tuned in to watch it. The result...

The leading evidence against the unitary household models is that "who gets what" is significantly dependent upon "who earns how much." However, it is difficult to pin down the causal effect of relative earnings on intra-household resource allocation because households jointly decide both labor...

The quality of subjective performance evaluation is dependent on the incentive structures faced by evaluators, in particular on how they are monitored and themselves evaluated. Figure skating competitions provide a unique opportunity to study subjective evaluation. This paper develops and tests...

This study consistently estimates the trade-off between child quantity and quality by exploiting exogenous variation in fertility due to son preferences. Under son preferences, childbearing and fertility timing are determined conditional on the first child's gender. For the sample of South...