an empirical model of job to job transition with self selectivity the statistical relationship between accepted job duration and the job to job transition strategy chosen by job quitters is analyzed using parametric duration methods because job quitters can sort themselves between unemployed and employed search the labor market state occupied before acceptance of a new job must contain information about the search preferred strategy the results show that jobs preceded by unemployment tend to be shorter but also reveal a substantial amount of heterogeneity when the sample is split between those having comparative advantages in unemployed search and those with comparative advantages in employed search however even for those who have comparative advantages in unemployed search choosing unemployment does not seem to raise subsequent job duration

learning and wage dynamics we develop a dynamic model of learning about worker ability in a competitive labor market the model produces three testable implications regarding wage dynamics 1 although the role of schooling in the labor market s inference process declines as performance observations accumulate the estimated effect of schooling on the level of wages is independent of labor market experience 2 timeinvariant variables correlated with ability but unobserved by employers such as certain test scores are increasingly correlated with wages as experience increases and 3 wage residuals are a martingale we present evidence from the nlsy that is broadly consistent with the model s predictions

reconciling the old and new census bureau education questions recommendations for researchers beginning with the 1990 census and the january 1992 current population survey cps the bureau of the census changed the emphasis of its educational attainment question from years of education to degree receipt using a matched sample from the 1991 and 1992 march cps this article addresses how to reconcile the old and new questions the effects of those methods on the estimated return s to education are then examined both the estimated linear return and the estimated college high school wage differential are slightly larger using information from the new question

social insurance and occupational mobility this paper studies how insurance from progressive taxation improves the matching of workers to occupations we propose an equilibrium dynamic assignment model to illustrate how social insurance encourages mobility workers experiment to find their best occupational fit in a process filled with uncertainty risk aversion and limited earnings insurance induce workers to remain in unfitting occupations we estimate the model using microdata from the united states and germany higher earnings uncertainty explains the u s higher mobility rate when workers in the united states enjoy germany s higher progressivity mobility rises output and welfare gains are large

the empirical content of the roy model this paper clarifies and extends the classical roy model of self selection and earnings inequality the original roy model based on the assumption that log skills are normally distributed is shown to imply that pursuit of comparative advantage in a free market reduces earnings inequality compared to the earnings distribution that would result if workers were randomly assigned to sectors aggregate log earnings are right skewed even if one sectoral distribution is left skewed most major implications of the log normal roy model survive if differences in skills are log concave however few implications of the model survive if skills are generated from more general distributions we consider the identifiability of the roy model from data on earnings distributions the normal theory version is identifiable without regressors or exclusion restrictions sectoral distributions can be identified knowing only the aggregate earnings distribution for general skill distributions the model is not identified and has no empirical content with sufficient price variation the model can be identified from multimarket data cross sectional variation in regressors can substitute for price variation in restoring empirical content to the roy model

the commuting time paradox abstract we examine the conditions for the commuting time paradox which states that the average commuting time does not vary between different periods we develop therefore an equilibrium job search model with endogenously chosen commuting costs presuming wage bargaining between workers and firms the optimally chosen maximum commuting costs jointly maximise the worker s and firm s payoffs we demonstrate that when productivity levels increase over time average commuting costs and average wages both increase which affects the optimally chosen commuting time we establish the conditions under which the paradox holds

experimentation and job choice in this article we examine optimal job choices when jobs differ in the rate at which they reveal information about workers skills we then analyze how the optimal level of experimentation changes over a worker s career and characterize job transitions and wage growth over the life cycle using the dictionary of occupational titles merged with the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 we then construct an index of how much information different occupations reveal about workers skills and document patterns of occupational choice and wage growth that are consistent with a trade off between information and wages

the speed of employer learning the employer learning literature finds support for statistical discrimination on the basis of schooling how economically relevant statistical discrimination is depends on how fast employers learn about workers productive types this article is the first to estimate the speed of employer learning employers learn quickly initial expectation errors decline by 50 within 3 years this estimate places an upper bound on the contribution of signaling this bound varies with the speed of employer learning and with discount rate for a wide range of parameter values the contribution of signaling to the gains from schooling is less than 25

does employer learning vary by occupation models of employer learning have two implications first the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience second the coefficient on an ability correlate that employers initially do not observe grows with experience if learning by employers varies across occupations both of these indicators of learning should covary positively across groups defined by a worker s initial occupational assignment this paper tests these implications using data from the nlsy79 and cps i find that there is significant heterogeneity in the employer learning process across occupations and that occupational assignment affects the learning process independently of education

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

a dynamic model of occupational choice abstract a dynamic model of occupational choice is developed where within an occupation the match at the current job may help forecast matches at future jobs an index policy is shown to be optimal each occupation is assigned an index and the occupation with the highest index is sampled when training costs are low and layoff risks are nonnegligible occupations in which job matching information is relatively occupation specific receive higher indices however this result is reversed when training costs are sufficiently high

help wanted job needed estimates of a matching function from employment service data i estimate a function that matches vacant jobs and unemployed workers to produce new hires israeli law requiring vacancy registration yields unique data quality the literature underestimates matching function coefficients because of a simultaneity bias as the outflow of hires depletes stocks of unemployed and vacancies instruments and a new simulation method address this bias a new test reveals strong evidence of heterogeneity in unemployed and vacancies estimates imply labor market dynamics that absorb shocks completely within only 2 months reductions in the hire rate of referrals can explain a 2 1 percentage point increase in unemployment between 1978 and 1990

relative efficiencies and comparative advantages in job search a model of employed and unemployed job search is estimated from a panel of new entrants into the labor force as well as prime age workers after investigating the relative efficiency of the two mai

job matching and on the job training conventional analysis predicts that workers pay part of their on the job training costs by accepting a lower starting wage and subsequently realize a return to this investment in the form of greater wage growth missing from the conventional treatment of on the job training is a discussion of the process by which heterogeneous workers are matched to jobs requiring varying amounts of training this matching process constitutes a key feature of the on the job training model presented in this article and tested with a unique data set containing extensive information concerning on the job training employer search wages and wage and productivity growth

comparative advantage learning and sectoral wage determination we develop a model in which a worker s skills determine the worker s current wage and sector the market and the worker are initially uncertain about some of the worker s skills endogenous wage changes and sector mobility occur as labor market participants learn about these unobserved skills we show how the model can be estimated using nonlinear instrumental variables techniques we apply our methodology to study wages and allocation of workers across occupations and industries using individual level panel data from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that high wage sectors employ high skill workers and offer high returns to workers skills

uncertain infant mortality learning and life cycle fertility this article examines the links between infant mortality and fertility in an environment with unobserved heterogeneity in infant mortality risk across mothers in such an environment replacement behavior i e the fertility response to an experienced child death might be influenced by mothers learning about a family specific component of infant mortality risk i explicitly introduce learning by mothers in a dynamic stochastic model of life cycle marital fertility and i estimate the model s structural parameters using malaysian panel data the framework is used to estimate replacement rates and to correct for birth selectivity in the estimation of the relationship between infant mortality risk and health inputs

labor heterogeneity wage bargaining and agglomeration economies abstract the modern economy is characterized by increasing returns to scale diverse production technology and specialized labor requirements with heterogeneous production technology increasing returns to scale and specific labor requirements we show that average productivity increases with the size of the labor market the larger the size of the market the better the matches between workers and firms resulting in lower on the job training costs through the wage bargaining between firms and workers the savings in training costs are transmitted into higher wages

immigration search and loss of skill this article develops and estimates an on the job search model of the entry of highly skilled immigrants from the former soviet union into the israeli labor market the estimated parameters of the model together with information on the wages of immigrants from earlier waves imply that on average immigrants can expect lifetime earnings to fall short of the lifetime earnings of comparable natives by 57 of this figure 14 percentage points reflect frictions associated with nonemployment and job distribution mismatch and 43 percentage points reflect the gradual adaptation of imported schooling and experience to the local labor market

asymmetric information and search frictions a neutrality result this paper integrates asymmetric information between firms into a canonical model of on the job search workers are heterogeneous in ability but not all employers observe a worker s type wage dispersion caused by search frictions makes the equilibrium wage distribution insensitive to informational asymmetries hence the equilibrium outcome may be the same as when a worker s ability is known to every firm the supportability of the full information outcome depends on market parameters related to productivity knowledge and search the theoretical results elucidate an empirical puzzle about demographic differences in asymmetric information between employers

learning about new products an empirical study of physicians behavior i introduction an important aspect of economic innovation is the development of new products thus firms often devote large amounts of resources to research and development the pharmaceutical industry in particular is characterized by a high degree of product innovation and significant investments in research and development 1 critical to the adoption of a new pharmaceutical however is the willingness of physicians to prescribe it although clinical trials and advertising convey information about the quality of a new pharmaceutical considerable uncertainty remains not only about its general quality but also about its effect on individual patients 2 because physicians ultimately resolve this uncertainty by prescribing the new drug 3 to their patients namely by experimentation the adoption of a new pharmaceutical is closely related to the experimentation process by which physicians gain information in this paper we focus on the entry of a new antiulcer drug omeprazole in the italian pharmaceutical market in june of 1990 4 our data consist of monthly prescriptions of antiulcer medications by physicians in the rome metropolitan area between june 1990 and december 1992 we develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of physician bayesian learning about the quality of a new drug in our model physicians have initial beliefs about the new drug s efficacy and update them every time that they prescribe the new drug and observe the treatment outcome when choosing which drug to prescribe to a particular patient a forward looking physician considers not only the expected outcome for that patient but also the opportunity to learn about the new drug s quality and use the information on future patients our parameter estimates allow us to disentangle how uncertainty about the new drug s quality intertemporal preferences and prices affect the adoption of the new drug and the corresponding health outcomes a recent literature has explored the role of learning about pharmaceuticals 5 as noted by manchanda et al 2005 in their review of this literature some important aspects of the learning mechanism are the channels through which agents learn prescription detailing marketing meetings and events their preferences toward risk risk averse or risk neutral and whether they are short sighted myopic or forward looking myopic agents maximize their current expected utility while forward looking agents evaluate their current utility as well as the expected future value of the information they might gain through the current prescription 6 the studies also differ in whether they use physician level or aggregate data a central contribution of our paper is the prediction of market demand for the new drug through a parsimonious yet behaviorally rich model using the same physician level data used here coscelli and shum 2004 model the behavior of doctors who learn in a bayesian fashion yet are myopic we in contrast model the forward looking behavior of physicians and reject the null hypothesis that physicians are myopic according to our estimates myopic behavior significantly delays the adoption of the new drug and generates large losses to patients health crawford and shum 2005 use related patient level data and model how forward looking patients learn about their curative and symptomatic matches with respect to alternative medications in their model a patient s learning about a medication is not driven by the fact that the medication is new rather it is driven by her need to learn which medication suits her best hence she learns about her match to each medication not just the new one in our model however learning is driven by the market level uncertainty associated with omeprazole as a new product 7 while it would be of interest to study both doctors and patients learning our doctor level data motivate our focus on physician learning

trade and industrial location with heterogeneous labor we show in the context of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter regional trade labor heterogeneity gives local monopoly power tofirms but also introduces variations in the quality of the job match matches are likely to be better when there are more fi rms and workers in the local market giving rise to an agglomeration force which can offset the forces against trade costs and the erosion of monopoly power we derive analytically a robust agglomeration equilibrium and illustrate its properties with numerical simulations

employer learning statistical discrimination and occupational attainment statistical discrimination plays a prominent role in theoretical discussions of the return to education as well as race and gender differences building on some earlier work by henry farber and robert gibbons 1996 hereafter fg and others on employer learning in the labor market altonji and pierret 2001 hereafter ap provide a test for statistical discrimination in an environment in which firms are learning about characteristics of workers over time however that model assumes that the rate at which employers learn about a given worker is independent of the type of job that he or she is in consequently the ap framework cannot readily be used to study statistical discrimination in hiring or how statistical discrimination and employer learning influence the skill level of the initial occupation and progression over a career in this paper i extend the ap analysis in three key respects first as in robert gibbons et al 2004 the sensitivity of output to worker skill is assumed to depend on the skill level of the job second the rate at which employers learn about the worker s skill is assumed to depend on the skill level of the job finally the probability of being hired into a given job depends on expected productivity relative to the wage i show that statistical discrimination influences initial employment rates wage levels and job type and that employers initial estimate of productivity influences wage growth even in an environment in which access to training is not an issue the implication is that the market may be slow to learn that a worker is highly skilled if the worker s best early job opportunity given the information available to employers is a low skill level job that reveals little about the worker s talent i close with a brief discussion of directions for empirical work suggested by the analysis

a theory of wage and promotion dynamics inside firms we show that a framework that integrates job assignment human capital acquisition and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms including the following first real wage decreases are not rare but demotions are second wage increases are serially correlated third promotions are associated with large wage increases fourth wage increases at promotion are small relative to the difference between average wages across levels of the job ladder fifth workers who receive large wage increases early in their stay at one level of the job ladder are promoted quickly to the next

testing for asymmetric employer learning recent evidence suggests that employers acquire more precise information about a worker s productivity the more time he or she spends in the labor market the following question arises is learning symmetric that is do all employers have the same information about workers productivity or is learning asymmetric that is does the current employer have superior information about workers productivity this article develops a learning model with endogenous mobility that nests both learning hypotheses it then proposes new tests for asymmetric employer learning overall learning appears to be mostly symmetric except possibly when the employees involved are college graduates

subsidised training and youth employment distinguishing unobserved heterogeneity from state dependence in labour market histories using the 1990 2 wave of the french labour force survey to study the employment histories of young people i consider transitions between six labour market states employment contracts whether permanent or temporary unemployment training education and non participation i use a fixed effect estimator in a dynamic multinomial logit model which can accommodate any form of unobserved heterogeneity in levels this analysis can be extended to markov processes of any order i relate heterogeneity components to individual and family characteristics by using simulated maximum likelihood methods these procedures allow evaluation of the effects training schemes have on youth employment histories

an estimate of a sectoral model of labor mobility this paper develops a model of sectoral labor mobility and tests its main implications the model nests two distinct hypotheses on the origin of mobility a sectoral shocks and b worker employer mismatch we estimate the relative importance of each hypothesis and find that the bulk of labor mobility is caused by mismatch rather than by sectoral shift we then try to put a value on society s match specific information that is we ask to what extent the availability of the option to change jobs raises gnp we find that the mobility option raises expected earnings by roughly between 8 5 percent and 13 percent of labor earnings which translates to an increase in gnp of between 6 percent and 9 percent

the effect of job heterogeneity on reservation wages this paper develops a model of job search in which jobs differ in the amount of inspection and experience uncertainty under these circumstances reservation wages may not remain constant or decrease over an unemployment spell even if job offer rates are constant over an unemployment spell negative duration dependence of the reemployment hazard can occur when individuals search amongst a variety of jobs since this duration dependence is a result of time varying unobserved heterogeneity conventional methods for controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in reduced form hazard models are inappropriate copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a dynamic analysis of educational attainment occupational choices and job search this article examines career choices using a dynamic structural model that nests a job search model within a human capital model of occupational and educational choices wage growth occurs in the model because workers move between firms and occupations as they search for suitable job matches and because workers endogenously accumulate firm and occupation specific human capital simulations performed using the estimated model reveal that both self selection in occupational choices and mobility between firms account for a much larger share of total earnings and utility than the combined effects of firm and occupation specific human capital

conditional choice probability estimation of dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneity we adapt the expectation maximization algorithm to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity into conditional choice probability ccp estimators of dynamic discrete choice problems the unobserved heterogeneity can be time invariant or follow a markov chain by developing a class of problems where the difference in future value terms depends on a few conditional choice probabilities we extend the class of dynamic optimization problems where ccp estimators provide a computationally cheap alternative to full solution methods monte carlo results confirm that our algorithms perform quite well both in terms of computational time and in the precision of the parameter estimates

the impact of student debt on education career and marriage choices of female lawyers abstract we develop and estimate a dynamic model to study the impact of student debt on education career and marriage market choices of young female lawyers our model accounts for several important institutional features of the labor market for lawyers including differences in the work hours across occupational tracks and learning about the prospects of promotion to partner some female students need to take on large amounts of student debt to finance their education and hence start their careers with large amounts of negative wealth the empirical findings suggest that student debt has negative effects on marriage prospects career prospects and investments in educational quality of female lawyers the analysis also provides new insights into the design of public policies that aim to increase public sector employment we show that it is possible to design conditional wage or debt service subsidy programs that significantly increase public sector career choices at reasonable costs

determinants of entrepreneurial activities in china abstract the institutional environment including protection of private properties and contract enforcement has been rather unfavorable for the emergence and development of china s private enterprises this is in sharp contrast to the case of the developed economies where the institutional environment is conductive to the entrepreneurial activities and only the personal attributes of would be entrepreneurs determine their entrepreneurship decision we thus propose a theoretical framework for the entrepreneurship decision in china with a focus on the role of the institutional environment using a life histories survey data of 2854 respondents from twenty cities in china we find strong support for the impacts of the institutional environment and its interactions with other determinants of entrepreneurship decision

unemployment vs mismatch of talents reconsidering unemployment benefits we develop an equilibrium search matching model with risk neutral agents and two sided ex ante heterogeneity unemployment insurance has the standard effect of reducing employment but also helps workers to get a suitable job we show through calibrations how the mere difference on unemployment insurance when countries experience a common skilled biased technological shock may result in differences in unemployment productivity growth and wage inequality these results are consistent with the contrasting performance of the labour market in europe and the united states in the last twenty five years the model is used to address some political economy issues

economic choice political decision and the problem of limits assesses the arguments for the use of market or political processes for making collective choices the border between what is mine and what is ours is contested but it is unguarded where should it lie how would we know when it should be adjusted i uncover an old paradox a society can never use political means to guard against incursions across the border for political ends some other mechanism such as constitutional or other extra statutory rules are required

ex ante returns and occupational choice using data from duke university undergraduates we make three main contributions to the literature first we show that data on earnings beliefs and probabilities of choosing particular occupations

agent based modeling public choice and the legacy of gordon tullock the future of modeling in public choice may be glimpsed by examining its evolution in economics for problems that are influenced by heterogeneity of actors social networks or emergence the arising of a complex system from simple phenomena such as adam smith s invisible hand economists increasingly are turning to agent based modeling agent based modeling is a form of computational analysis that focuses on agents rather than on aggregates in his long career as a founding scholar of public choice gordon tullock repeatedly followed the agent oriented approach of methodological individualism many of tullock s models are thus highly amenable to further exploration using that method as agent based modeling becomes more and more popular the importance of tullock s work will continue to grow

labor heterogeneity in an urban labor market abstract we construct a model of agglomeration economies in a labor market with friction and heterogeneity of both workers and firms with friction matches between workers and firms are random we show that with random matches an increase in the number of workers brings improvements in worker firm match quality and agglomeration economies emerge if and only if the technology of search exhibits increasing returns to scale we then discuss how to find out empirically whether this condition is satisfied furthermore we investigate properties of the agglomeration economies here and the relation between the city size and states of a labor market

city structure search and workers job acceptance behavior abstract this paper develops a stochastic search model having a monocentric city structure and investigates how city structure affects workers job acceptance behavior and a labor market in the model workers reside in a city and commute to the central business district cbd to work when employed and to be interviewed when unemployed when a job searcher contacts a firm having a vacant job he she observes the level of training costs necessary for employment and decides whether to accept the job it is shown that there exists a unique market equilibrium in which the employed live close to the cbd and the unemployed reside far away from the cbd analysis shows that 1 improvement of commuting technology induces job searchers to accept more costly jobs and lowers the unemployment rate in the city 2 growth of the city makes job searchers less tolerant of training and raises the unemployment rate and 3 as job searchers search more intensively they become choosier if commuting costs are sufficiently small efficiency properties of the equilibrium are also explored

inter industry wage differentials revisited wage volatility and the option value of mobility analysis of data from the psid reveals that idiosyncratic wage volatility varies inversely with inter industry wage differentials and is positively correlated with both returns to industry tenure and rates of inter industry mobility an incomplete markets life cycle model in which inter industry mobility decisions and wage differentials are endogenously determined in equilibrium is then developed and shown to be capable of rationalizing these features of the data in the model the ability of worker to switch industries generates option value that is large enough to offset the standard risk premium that workers demand for exposure to excess wage volatility

returns to scale in a matching model of the labor market abstract this paper presents evidence on the degree of returns to scale in the labor market using a transcendental logarithmic model of the labor market matching technology the empirical results imply locally increasing returns to scale and are consistent with multiple equilibria thereby suggesting a potentially welfare enhancing role for macroeconomic policy intervention

cross section estimation of the matching function evidence from england and wales this paper analyses how the levels of unemployment and vacancies affect the rate at which unemployed workers find employment the worker firm matching function in particular we test the robustness of previous empirical work by checking whether we obtain the same estimated function using cross section data rather than aggregate time series data we find strong evidence of constant returns to scale similar to previous work we also find larger cities have higher wages this provides indirect support for increasing returns but where those returns are taken in the form of better quality matches

car ownership and the labor market of ethnic minorities we show how initial wealth differences between low skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor market outcomes this even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against ethnic minorities or exogenous differences in distance to jobs because of the initial wealth difference minorities cannot afford to buy a car while whites can car ownership allows whites to reach more jobs per unit of time which gives them a better bargaining position in the labor market as a result in equilibrium ethnic minorities end up with both higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites furthermore we also show that it takes more time for minorities to reach their jobs even though they travel less miles when employed those predictions are consistent with the data better access to capital markets or better public transportation will reduce the differences in labor market outcomes

dynamic logit with choice aversion we characterize a generalization of discounted logistic choice that incorporates a parameter to capture different views the agent might have about the costs and benefits of larger choice sets the discounted logit model used in the empirical literature is the special case that displays a preference for flexibility in the sense that the agent always prefers to add additional items to a menu other cases display varying levels of choice aversion where the agent prefers to remove items from a menu if their ex ante value is below a threshold we show that higher choice aversion as measured by dislike of bigger menus also corresponds to an increased preference for putting off decisions as late as possible

why do cities pay more an empirical examination of some competing theories of the urban wage premium abstract ols regression identifies a 19 percent wage advantage for workers in large urban areas fixed effects estimation suggests that two thirds of this premium can be explained by cities attracting workers of higher unmeasured skills and ability the remaining wage premium is shown to consist of both level and growth elements the wage level effect is consistent with a productivity advantage for firms located in cities the wage growth effect is shown to relate in part to a cumulative advantage in the returns to job mobility for urban workers this last finding highlights the importance of coordination in urban labor markets

endogenous job destruction and job matching in cities we propose a spatial search matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their jobs can be hit by a technological shock which decreases their productivity they reside in a city and commuting to the job center involves both pecuniary and time costs as a result workers with high wages are willing to live closer to jobs to save on time commuting costs we show that in equilibrium there is a one to one correspondence between the productivity space and the urban location space workers with high productivities and wages reside close to jobs have low per distance commuting costs and pay high land rents we also show that higher per distance commuting costs and higher unemployment benefits lead to more job destruction

agglomeration economies in urban manufacturing industries a case of japanese cities abstract the effects of urban agglomeration economies on productivities in two digit manufacturing industries is estimated using the cross section data of japanese cities in 1979 urbanization and localization economies which are major forms of urban agglomeration economies are explicitly separated the estimates of these economies vary considerably among industries light industries receive more productive advantages from urbanization economies than from localization economies but heavy industries experience these economies more from localization economies than from urbanization economies

aggregate job matching and returns to scale in germany abstract it is found that in 1984 the german matching function shifted from increasing to constant or even decreasing returns to scale such a regime shift is consistent with a move from a multiple equilibria environment to a single equilibrium state where policies lose effectiveness

job search with belated information and wage signalling a comment abstract berninghaus 1986 investigated the optimal policy in a job search problem with belated information where jobs contain nonpecuniary components that can be observed only after the job has been tested for one period berninghaus uses techniques of dynamic programming specifically the gittens index to derive conditions under which a reservation wage policy is optimal for this problem we demonstrate that the gittens index has a simple economic interpretation when the pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns are jointly normally distributed the reservation wage policy is optimal in this case if the returns are either positively correlated or weakly negatively correlated

introduction to the distribution of earnings and of individual output by a d roy this article summarises the lasting contribution of roy s 1950 fundamental paper roy a d 1950 the distribution of earnings and of individual output economic journal vol 60 239 pp 489 505

search in cities the aim of this paper is to expose the recent developments of urban search models which incorporate a land market into a search matching framework using these models we will be able to explain why unemployment rates vary within a city how city structure affects workers labor market outcomes how unemployment benefits and the job destruction rate affect the growth of cities and why workers living far away from job centers search less intensively and experience higher unemployment rates than those residing closer to jobs we are also able to explain why as compared to whites black workers spend more time commuting to work but travel less miles and search for jobs over a smaller area

empirical analysis of occupational hierarchies using data on u s engineers and the position of engineering jobs within firms this paper estimates a model of hierarchies within firms the model extends rosen s 1982 model of recursive production to two skills and multiple hierarchy levels the model generates an empirical model that is nested within a general roy 1951 model of self selection maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of the production technology and the skill experience profiles are estimated the results suggest that approximately two thirds of changes in employment shares across hierarchy levels across time are explained by demographic shifts in the stock of engineering skills most of the returns to experience and to assignment to higher hierarchy levels within firms are caused by skill accumulation and self selection rather than technological dierences across hierarchy levels

providing advice to jobseekers at low cost an experimental study on online advice we develop and evaluate experimentally a novel tool that redesigns the job search process by providing tailored advice at low cost we invited jobseekers to our computer facilities for twelve consecutive weekly sessions to search for real jobs on our web interface for one half instead of relying on their own search criteria we use readily available labour market data to display relevant alternative occupations and associated jobs the data indicate that this broadens the set of jobs they consider and increases their job interviews especially for participants who otherwise search narrowly and have been unemployed for a few months

enriching a theory of wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in previous work we showed that a model that integrates job assignment human capital acquisition and learning can explain several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in this article we extend that model in two ways first we incorporate schooling and derive further testable implications that we then compare with the available empirical evidence second and more important we show that introducing task specific human capital allows us to produce cohort effects we further argue that task specific human capital is a realistic concept and may have many important implications we also discuss limitations of our extended approach

why are ceos rarely fired evidence from structural estimation i evaluate the forced ceo turnover rate and quantify effects on shareholder value by estimating a dynamic model the model features learning about ceo ability and costly turnover to fit the observed forced turnover rate the model needs the average board of directors to behave as if replacing the ceo costs shareholders at least 200 million this cost mainly reflects ceo entrenchment rather than a real cost to shareholders the model predicts that shareholder value would rise 3 if we eliminated this perceived turnover cost all else equal the model also helps explain the relation between ceo firings tenure and profitability

job matching and occupational choice this paper presents a model of job matching the generalizes the existing literature by allowing for different jobs types or occupations such differences affect the value of job specific experience inducing a career profile where certain types are sampled before others more specifically the analysis shows that it is optimal for the young and inexperienced to gravitate toward jobs exhibiting a certain kind of risk then after deriving the equilibrium job turnover rate for an economy in which people do not switch occupations panel data are used to estimate its underlying parameters the hypothesis that people do not switch occupations is rejected against the alternative that they do thus providing empirical support for the theoretical extension undertaken here

job separation in a non stationary search model a structural estimation to evaluate alternative unemployment insurance systems this paper considers a job search model in which the environment is not constant throughout the unemployment spell and where jobs do not last for ever in this situation reservation wages can be lower than they would be in a model without consideration of such separations but they can initially be higher precisely because of the non constant environment the model is estimated structurally by using spanish data for the period 1985 1996 the main finding is that after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity the unemployment hazard rate is almost flat during the first six months however after this duration the highly decreasing job offer arrival rate comes to be the only significant factor given that acceptance probabilities become equal to one the estimated parameters are used to evaluate different unemployment insurance designs we conclude that a non monotonic pattern in unemployment benefits joint with a tax paid by workers and based on unemployment duration makes this duration 13 2 lower than it currently is in spain copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

tariff choice with consumer learning and switching costs abstract consumers choosing flat rate contracts tend to have insufficient usage to warrant the cost particularly for new products we propose and estimate a bayesian learning model of tariff and usage choice that explains this flat rate bias without relying on behavioral misjudgments or tariff specific preferences for new products consumers are uncertain about both their utility relative to the population mean and the mean itself we show that this latter uncertainty inflates prior variances which leads consumers to weight their private signals more heavily when updating beliefs posteriors are unbiased across products for a given product however the unknown mean yields a winner s curse consumers with high posteriors tend to overestimate their utility these consumers choose fixed rate tariffs and lower their usage as they correct their beliefs the flat rate bias arises when switching costs deter them from changing tariffs using the estimated model the authors find that tariff menus are ineff