This paper provides a model of social hysteresis whereby long, deep recessions demotivate workers and thereby lead them to change their work ethic. In switching from a pro-work to an anti-work identity, their incentives to seek and retain work fall and consequently their employment chances fall....

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...

We build a dynamic capital structure model to study the link between systematic risk exposure and debt maturity, as well as their joint impact on the term structure of credit spreads. Our model allows for time variation and lumpiness in the maturity structure. Relative to short-term debt,...

We study the trading dynamics in an asset market where the quality of assets is private information of the owner and finding a counterparty takes time. When trading of a financial asset ceases in equilibrium as a response to an adverse shock to asset quality, a large player can resurrect the...

This paper describes how to use the R package gateveys to establish a transparent and reproducible aggregation work flow for longitudinal data stemming from business tendency surveys (BTS). Business tendency survey researchers are addressed in particular though the suggested work flow could also...

Incentive schemes not only influence the effort provision of workers, but might also induce sorting. As drivers of self-selection, the literature mainly focuses on measures of productivity; however, other variables, such as preferences, beliefs and personality, also play a role. With this paper,...

Traditionally, it has been argued that profit sharing can increase employment and welfare because it lowers marginal labour costs without reducing total cost or labour income. In this paper, we show that profit sharing can also represent a Pareto-improvement if labour supply is excessive due to...