Usinga detailed sample of semi-skilled production workers we find that holding a wide range of personal and job-related characteristics constant, workers assigned to more complex jobs seem to be more likely to quit than are workers assigned to simpler jobs. Job complexity has no discernible...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a proprietary sample of semi-skilled production workers, this paper investigates the reasons for the discontinuous increase in wages associated with graduation from high school. Associated with graduation from high school, we find a...

Proprietary data for production workeis is analyzed to determine which aspects of productivity are affected by secondary schooling. The measures of productivity explored are: propensity to quit and be absent, phisical oatput per hour, and ability to perform complex tasks. The data suggests that...

We have used a proprietary data set of newly hired semi-skilled production workers at one location of a large unionized firm to investigate several issues in labor economics. This data set is unique in several respects: the workers in our sample faced the same wage schedules, had the same...

We construct a model in which firms use workers' productivities in determining their job assignments. A worker's productivity must exceed some lower bound to satisfy the minimum qualifications for a particular job. If the worker's productivity exceeds some upper bound he is promoted. Under these...

We consider a model where a worker's productivity must exceed some lower bound for himto satisfy the minimum qualifications for a particular job. If the worker's productivity exceeds some upper bound he is promoted. We assume the productivity of every worker increases with experience, tenure and...

In this paper we analyze games in which there is trade between informed and uninformed players. The informed know the value of the trade (for instance, the value of their productivity in a labor market example); the uninformed only know the distribution of attributes among the informed. The...

This paper analyzes a sorting model of labor contracts when workers have private information about their own productivities, and firms can test (monitor) workers. We show that sorting considerations alone generate steep wage-tenure profiles, high turnover rates of newly hired workers, and...

This paper surveys recent developments in the theory of pareto efficient taxation. This literature attempts to characterize those tax structures which, given the limitations on the government's information and other limitations on the government's ability to impose taxes, maximize the welfare of...

This paper explores the implications for less developed countries the hypothesis that workers' productivity depends on the wages they receive. In particular, we show that this hypothesis may explain the high urban wages and unemployment found in many such countries. The market equilibrium is...