I characterize the constrained efficient (or planner's) allocation in a directed (competitive) search model with private information. There are sellers with private information on one side of the market and homogeneous buyers on the other side. They match bilaterally in different submarkets and...

This paper examines James Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of the exchange economy. An initial hypothesis holds the decisive influence of a plan designed and implemented by merchants. Our proposal evokes the importance, acknowledged by Steuart, of the construction of institutions,...

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

December 1, 1996 Portugal introduced a new law on working hours which gradually reduced the standard workweek from 44 hours to 40 hours. We study how this mandatory working hours reduction affected employment and earnings of workers involved. We find for workers who were affected by the new law...

Recent studies debate how the unobserved dependence between the monetary return to college education and selection into college can be characterized. This paper examines this question using British data. We develop a semiparametric local instrumental variables estimator for identified features...

This paper studies the presence of hours constraints on the UK labor market and its effect on older workers labor supply, both at the extensive and the intensive margin. Using panel data for the period 1991-2004, the results from a competing risks model show that over-employed male workers can...

This paper analyzes wage structures in the public and the private sector for Germany. The data contains a rich set of variables on parents' characteristics that we use as instruments. We extend the empirical literature in this field by endogenizing education level and hours worked, and by using...

The paper explores the relationship between job flows and wages in the U.S. manufacturing sector, where wage differentials for seemingly identical workers and job reallocation rates are shown to be negatively correlated across 3-digit industries.High wage industries have the lowest turnover of...

A regression of wages on firm tenure is likely to yield biased estimates of the returns to tenure because tenure and wages are confounded by unobserved attributes of the job and the unobserved quality of the match between the firm and the employee. Previously, the within-job variation in tenure...

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore...