efficient search on the job and the business cycle the paper develops a model of directed search on the job in which transitions of workers between unemployment and employment and across employers are driven by heterogeneity in the quality of firm worker matches the equilibrium is such that the agents value and policy functions are independent of the endogenous distribution of workers across employment states hence the model can be solved outside of the steady state and used to measure the effect of cyclical productivity shocks on the labor market productivity shocks are found to generate large fluctuations in workers transitions unemployment and vacancies when matches are experience goods but not when matches are inspection goods

spatial and economic patterns in life expectancy among us states this study investigates the determinants of gender specific life expectancy across us states over the period 1995 2007 we employ a production function specification where life expectancy depends o

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

job matching within and across firms this article proposes a matching model of the labor market in the presence of uncertainty and learning about ability that provides a simple unified framework for analyzing the dynamics of jobs and wages within firms and in the labor market the model allows for different degrees of generality of ability as well as speeds of learning across jobs and firms equilibrium assignments and wages are consistent with a broad range of empirical findings on careers suggest a novel interpretation for well documented patterns and help explain features of careers usually thought difficult to reconcile with the presence of uncertainty and learning

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

estimating the efficiency of the system of healthcare financing in achieving better health this paper contributes to the effort to model and measure how the method of financing of health expenditure affects the efficiency with which better health can be achieved the focus is on the health system efficiency at the country level which provides an alternative to the work done in the who in this regard the approach uses frontier techniques as in the who studies however the paper appeals to the economic index number theory of quantity and productivity indexes which have well established axiomatic properties and provides a means for aggregating multiple health output proxies without having to attach arbitrary weights this allows the proposal of a specification that embeds health sector performance in a broader index of economic inputs and outputs and allows for comparisons across countries and time

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

on the incentive effects of job rotation abstract a new employee may work hard to build his reputation this effect is greatest when he starts the longer he is employed at his job the more the firm will already have learned about his ability the incentives for an employee to influence the firm s perceptions of his ability decrease over time if rotating the employee to a different job leads to new uncertainty about his ability this generates a fresh impulse for effort however job rotation also reduces the employee s time horizon thus reducing future rents from reputation this trade off leads to a unique optimum we derive a simple rule of thumb for an optimal rotation time our main results still hold for cases of complete but imperfect information transmission the incentive effects of job rotation also prevail in a setting in which skills are job specific we study several extensions rotations across multiple employees absence of commitment to a rotation time different bargaining positions discounting over time and learning by doing effects

worker mobility in a search model with adverse selection we analyze the effects of adverse selection on worker turnover and wage dynamics in a frictional labor market we consider a model of on the job search where firms offer promotion wage contracts to workers of different abilities which is unknown to firms at the hiring stage with sufficiently strong information frictions low wage firms offer separating contracts and hire all types of workers in equilibrium whereas high wage firms offer pooling contracts promoting high ability workers only low ability workers have higher turnover rates and are more often employed in low wage firms the model replicates the negative relationship between job to job transitions and wages observed in the u s labor market

occupational mobility and the returns to training the literature on the returns to training has pointed out that immediately following a training episode wages of participants in employer sponsored training increase substantially while wages of participants in government sponsored training hardly change we argue that there is a potential selection issue most of the government sponsored trainees are occupation switchers while most participants in employer sponsored training are occupation stayers an occupational switch involves a substantial destruction of human capital and once we account for the associated decline in wages we find a large positive impact of both employer and government sponsored training on workers human capital mobilite professionnelle et benefices des formations les etudes ayant trait aux benefices conferes par les formations professionnelles montrent que lorsque ces dernieres sont parrainees par l employeur le salaire des participants augmente significativement a l issue de leur formation en revanche lorsqu elles sont parrainees par le gouvernement le salaire des participants n evolue presque pas nous affirmons qu il s agit la d un probleme de selection potentiel dans le cadre des formations parrainees par le gouvernement la plupart des participants sont tres mobiles en emploi tandis que dans le cadre des formations parrainees par l employeur les participants sont tres stables en emploi une plus grande mobilite professionnelle genere une destruction importante du capital humain et des lors que l on tient compte de la baisse concomitante des salaires nous estimons que les formations parrainees a la fois par l etat et l employeur ont une incidence tres positive sur le capital humain des employes

determinants of healthcare spending a state level analysis within the high and rising level of healthcare spending for the us as a whole is substantial variation in spending across states yet relatively little attention has been given to the empirical analysis of interstate differences in aggregate healthcare expenditures and therefore little empirical evidence exists at the state level to guide policymakers using data for all 50 states for the year 1998 we estimate an empirical model that includes structural and reduced form healthcare spending equations and a health production function to assess the significance size and relative importance of factors that prior research indicates may play an important role in explaining interstate variation in medical care expenditures and the main pathways through which they operate our results indicate higher levels of healthcare spending for state populations with higher income less education fewer uninsured residents less healthy lifestyles larger proportion of elderly residents greater availability of medical

estimating willingness to pay with exaggeration bias corrected contingent valuation method estimates of the prices customers are willing to pay for new products or services using responses from survey questionnaires are notoriously biased on the high side an approach to obtaining more realistic estimates is suggested here called the exaggeration bias corrected contingent valuation method ebc cvm the method is an alternative to conventional contingent valuation methods cvms that have been used in economics and to a lesser extent in marketing two experiments and one field study are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in each case the proposed method outperformed conventional cvms in comparison with real choices or more realistic price estimates

hypothetical versus real willingness to pay in the health care sector results from a field experiment abstract we conducted a field experiment comparing hypothetical and real purchase decisions for a pharmacist provided asthma management program among 172 subjects with asthma subjects received either a dichotomous choice contingent valuation question or were given the opportunity to actually enroll in the program three different prices were used us 15 40 and 80 in the hypothetical group 38 of subjects said that they would purchase the good at the stated price but only 12 of subjects in the real group purchased the good p 0 000 we cannot however reject the null hypothesis that definitely sure hypothetical yes responses as identified in a follow up question correspond to real yes responses we conclude that the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method overestimates willingness to pay but that it may be possible to correct for this overestimation by sorting out definitely sure yes responses

estimating a health production function for the us some new evidence this study reports some new evidence on the impact of medical care socioeconomic lifestyle and environmental factors on the health status of the population of the usa the results show that additional medical care utilization is relatively ineffective in lowering mortality and increasing life expectancy the most important factors that influence death rates are related to socioeconomic status and lifestyle the results suggest that health care policy which focuses primarily on the provision of medical care services and ignores larger economic and social considerations may do little to benefit the nation s health

the u s health care expenditure evidence from 2001 to 2009 abstractthis study utilizes state level data from 2001 to 2009 to estimate the impact of the 2007 financial crisis upon health care expenditures higher death rates are consistently found to have a positive and statistically significant impact on health expenditures while mental health and copd are not generally found to impact expenditures increases in the percentage of the population diagnosed with cholesterol and obesity tend to increase health expenditures increases in health expenditures slowed considerably after the financial crisis even though recessions high unemployment rates are generally found to have a positive impact on health expenditures the post financial crisis time period is estimated to have much lower health expenditures than in other time periods our results can be used to give insight into the conditions under which the slower rate of increase in health expenditures can be expected to increase more research will be needed to be able to more completely explore not only the re

decomposition of total factor productivity in world health production a stochastic frontier approach while countries around the globe have increased spending on health care economists and policy makers have raised concerns over the productivity and efficiency of health care this article applies a stochastic frontier approach to address this issue using data from 141 countries for the period 1993 to 1997 from the perspective of productivity change our results suggest that gains in population health will be greater provided that more resources are allocated to investment in human capital we also show that the scale component accounts for 65 70 of the productivity change that is omitting the scale component in our case will result in a significant underestimation of the decline in the productivity of world health production we do not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that production frontiers differ between organization for economic cooperation and development oecd and non oecd countries however the change in productivity and scale elasticity do vary significantly between these countries

uncertainty and unemployment this paper studies the impact of time varying idiosyncratic risk at the establishment level on unemployment fluctuations over 1972 2009 i build a tractable directed search model with firm dynamics and time varying idiosyncratic volatility the model allows for endogenous separations entry and exit and job to job transitions i show that the model can replicate salient features of the microeconomic behavior of firms and that the introduction of volatility improves the fit of the model for standard business cycle moments in a series of counterfactual experiments i show that time varying risk is important to account for the magnitude of fluctuations in aggregate unemployment for past u s recessions though the model can account for about 40 of the total increase in unemployment for the 2007 2009 recession uncertainty alone is not sufficient to explain the magnitude and persistence of unemployment during that episode

occupational and job mobility in the us we propose a new methodology to measure worker mobility across occupations and jobs in the us building on the limited longitudinal dimension of monthly cps data for the period 1979 2006 we find that about 3 5 of male workers employed in two consecutive months report different three digit occupations this rate is procyclical mildly rising in the 1980s and falling after 1995 we also revise upward current estimates of aggregate job to job mobility since 1994 from 2 7 to 3 2 of employment per month despite extreme similarity of average levels and time series behavior occupational and job mobility are only weakly correlated

estimating a health production function for sub saharan africa ssa the paper estimates a health production function for sub saharan africa based on the grossman 1972 theoretical model that treats social economic and environmental factors as inputs of the production system in estimating this function socioeconomic and environmental factors such as income per capita illiteracy rate food availability ratio of health expenditure to gdp urbanization rate and carbon dioxide emission per worker are specified as determinants of health status the parameters of the function are estimated by one way and two way fixed and random effects model of panel data analyses the results of the two way random effect model suggest that an increase in income per capita a decrease in illiteracy rate and an increase in food availability are strongly associated with an improvement in life expectancy at birth overall the results imply that a health policy which may focus on the provision of health services family planning programs and emergency aids to the exclusion of other socio

job matching and the wage distribution this paper brings together the microeconomic labor and the macroeconomic equilibrium views of matching in labor markets we nest a job matching model a la jovanovic 1984 into a mortensen and pissarides 1994 type equilibrium search environment the resulting framework preserves the implications of job matching theory for worker turnover and wage dynamics and it also allows for aggregation and general equilibrium analysis we obtain two new equilibrium implications of job matching and search frictions for wage inequality first learning about match quality and worker turnover map gaussian output noise into an ergodic wage distribution of empirically accurate shape unimodal skewed with a paretian right tail second high idiosyncratic productivity risk hinders learning and sorting and reduces wage inequality the equilibrium solutions for the wage distribution and for the aggregate worker flows quits to unemployment and to other jobs displacements hires provide the likelihood function of the model in closed form

learning your comparative advantages we introduce an equilibrium labor market model where workers gradually learn about their unobserved production abilities while engaged in a productive activity occupation workers observe their output and extract information that allows them to make inferences about their unobserved aptitudes because workers are learning about themselves their output informs them not only about their productivity in their current occupation but about their likely productivity in other occupations as well as workers acquire more information they self select into the occupations in which they expect to perform best and their wages increase returns to experience here capture improved job selection by workers as they sort through occupations and learn

universal health insurance in the clinton plan coverage as a tax financed public good the financing arrangements embodied in the clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed the subsidies to small low wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both labor and products and offer incentives for the creation of small firms in addition the financing scheme implicitly envisions a head tax on families at modest income levels but offers a possible rationale for it nevertheless the main reason for many of the financing features appears to be an attempt to hold down the apparent budgetary cost of universal coverage

international mortality modelling an economic perspective abstract a recent literature has developed on modelling mortality in multiple populations together the purpose of this paper is to suggest a reason why mortality in different populations may be related based on an economic literature on technology and knowledge diffusion

why do firms train theory and evidence this paper offers a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for the general training they receive the superior information of the current employer regarding its employees abilities relative to other firms creates ex post monopsony power and encourages this employer to provide and pay for training even if these skills are general the model can lead to multiple equlibria in one equilibrium quits are endogenously high and as a result employers have limited monopsony power and provide little training while in another equilibrium quits are low and training is high using microdata on german apprentices we show that the predictions of our model receive some support from the data

the contingent valuation debate why economists should care t he contingent valuation method involves the use of sample surveys questionnaires to elicit the willingness of respondents to pay for generally hypothetical projects or programs the name of the method refers to the fact that the values revealed by respondents are contingent upon the constructed or simulated market presented in the survey a spirited and occasionally mean spirited battle over such methods is currently being waged involving competing factions within the federal government economists and lawyers representing business and environmental groups and interested academics as well at issue is a seemingly quite specific question should environmental regulations currently under development at both the department of the interior and the department of commerce sanction the use of the contingent valuation method in estimating the damage done by spills of oil chemicals or other substances covered by federal law more generally the debate raises broad questions about what economists have to say about the values that individuals place on public or private goods the two papers that follow this one make cases for and against the use of the contingent valuation method my aim here is to provide an overview of the technique and the debate surrounding it i also want to suggest why this debate should matter to economists both professionally and in their roles as citizens and consumers

directed search and job rotation abstract we consider the impact of job rotation in a directed search model in which firm sizes are endogenously determined and match quality is initially unknown a large firm benefits from the opportunity to rotate workers so as to partially overcome the loss of mismatch as a result in the unique symmetric equilibrium large firms have higher labor productivity and lower separation rates in contrast to the standard directed search model with multi vacancy firms this model can generate a positive correlation between firm size and wage without introducing any ex ante productivity differences or imposing any non concave production function assumptions

a selectivity model of employer size wage differentials this article investigates wage differentials for employees of different size firms utilizing an econometric methodology that allows the size of employer to be treated as endogenous in the context of discrete ordered employer size data as a result we are able to estimate i employer size wage gaps which are corrected for selectivity bias and ii the magnitude and direction of the selection bias decompositions of the resulting wage differentials are computed with comparisons of the conditional on sorting across employer size and unconditional wage gaps

what should i be when i grow up occupations and unemployment over the life cycle abstract why is unemployment higher for younger individuals we address this question in a frictional model of the labor market that features learning about occupational fit in order to learn the occupation in which they are most productive workers sample occupations over their careers because young workers are more likely to be in matches that represent a poor occupational fit they spend more time in transition between occupations through this mechanism our model can replicate the observed age differences in unemployment which as in the data are due to differences in job separation rates

the u shapes of occupational mobility using administrative panel data on the entire danish population we document a new set of facts characterizing occupational mobility for most occupations mobility is u shaped and directional not only low but also high wage earners within an occupation have a particularly large probability of leaving their occupation and the low high earners tend to switch to new occupations with lower higher average wages exceptions to this pattern of two sided selection are occupations with steeply rising declining productivity where mainly the lower higher paid workers within this occupation tend to leave the facts conflict with several existing theories that are used to account for endogeneity in occupational choice but it is shown analytically that the patterns are explained consistently within a theory of vertical sorting under absolute advantage that includes learning about workers abilities

measuring consumers willingness to pay at the point of purchase abstract economists psychologists and marketing researchers rely on measures of consumers willingness to pay wtp in estimating demand for private and public goods and in designing optimal price schedules existing market research techniques for measuring wtp differ in whether they provide an incentive to consumers to reveal their true wtp and in whether they simulate actual point of purchase contexts the authors present an empirical comparison of several procedures for eliciting wtp that are applicable directly at the point of purchase in particular the authors test the applicability of becker degroot and marschak s 1964 well known incentive compatible procedure for assessing the utility of lotteries to measuring consumers wtp in three studies the authors explore the reliability validity and feasibility of the procedure and show that it yields lower wtp estimates than do non incentive compatible methods such as open ended and double bounded contingent valuation they show experimentally t

environmental quality medical care demand and environmental tax interactions assuming that improvements in environmental quality lead to lower demand for medical care it has been shown that general equilibrium interactions with the tax distorted labor market reduce the benefits from such improvements and thus lower the second best optimal environmental tax this paper provides some insights on how the link between environmental quality individual s health capital and the demand for medical care affects the analysis of pollution taxes the paper develops structural conditions under which improvements in environmental quality decrease increase the demand for medical care and discusses their implications for environmental tax interactions

learning by doing adverse selection and firm structure abstract much of the literature devoted to explaining the existence of firms has focused on the firm as either a transactions cost economizing institution or as a means of allocating residual property rights to output contrastingly this paper explores the implications for firm structure of a particular form of learning by doing which arises because of the relationship between jobs it implies that a worker s productivity in some of these jobs depends on whether the worker had previously performed certain other jobs this issue is analyzed using an overlapping generations model the analysis shows that when firms are specialized as to jobs there is a misallocation of workers across productive activities the allocation of workers is efficient when firms are integrated across the jobs further when firm structure is an endogenous choice the equilibrium is characterized by all firms being integrated across jobs

employer learning productivity and the earnings distribution evidence from performance measures two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience and innovations in wage residuals have a large unpredictable component the leading explanations for these patterns are that over time either firms learn about worker productivity but productivity remains fixed or workers productivities themselves evolve heterogeneously in this paper we seek to disentangle these two models and place magnitudes on their relative importance we derive a dynamic model of learning and productivity that nests both models and allows them to coexist we estimate our model on a 20 year panel of pay and performance measures from a single large firm the baker gibbsholmstrom data incorporating performance measures yields two key innovations first the panel structure implies that we have repeat measures of correlates of productivity as opposed to the empirical evidence on employer learning which uses one fixed measure second we can separate productivity from pay whereas the previous literature on productivity evolution could not we find that both models are important in explaining the data however the predominant effect is that worker productivity evolves idiosyncratically over time implying firms must continuously learn about a moving target therefore while the majority of pay dispersion is driven by variation in individual productivity wages differ significantly from individual productivity at all experience levels due to imperfect information we believe this represents a significant reinterpretation of the empirical literature on employer learning

work characteristics firm size and wages a positive wage firm size relationship is well documented in the empirical literature in industrial organization and labor economics firm size seems to proxy various unobserved determinants such as job satisfaction monitoring costs more complex technologies and worker participation in monopoly profits it is generally argued that the greater the possibility of controlling for these latent factors the less likely that a significant size effect will appear this paper attempts to distinguish firm size from other wage determinants for a rich data source for west germany and demonstrates the persistence of the size premium

does more medical care improve population health new evidence for an old controversy this article investigates the aggregate relationship between medical care and health for the us population i use annual state level panel data for the period 1983 to 2000 to estimate static and dynamic health production function models i find no compelling evidence that greater aggregate utilization of medical care from application of existing technology improves population health by lowering mortality in the short run or long run my results suggest that development of new medical technologies that diffuse rapidly throughout the nation and at different rates across states may well explain much of the decline in the age adjusted death rate over the past several decades as well as persistent differences in mortality across geographic regions overall my findings suggest that the us may be experiencing flat of the curve medicine with future improvements in mortality from medical care coming from new and better technologies rather than greater intensity of services

occupational mobility and wage inequality in this article we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related we are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the u s was as high as 16 a year in the early 1970 s and had increased to 21 by the mid 1990 s we develop a general equilibrium model with occupation specific human capital and heterogeneous experience levels within occupations we find that the model calibrated to match the level of occupational mobility in the 1970 s accounts quite well for the level of within group wage inequality in that period next we find that the model calibrated to match the increase in occupational mobility accounts for over 90 of the increase in wage inequality between the 1970 s and the 1990 s the theory is also quantitatively consistent with the level and increase in the short term variability of earnings copyright wiley blackwell

economic upturns are good for your heart but watch out for accidents a study on swedish regional data 1976 2005 this article explores the relationship between the regional unemployment rate in total and cause specific mortality in sweden during 1976 2005 overall mortality is unrelated to changes in the unemployment rate while the biggest cause of death heart disease decreases when the unemployment rate decreases at the same time other accidents including job related accidents increases when the unemployment rate decreases swedish evidence provide no support for the us research findings that short term decreases in the unemployment rate are bad for your health in general

on the job search and strategic bargaining abstract this paper studies wage bargaining in a simple economy in which both employed and unemployed workers search for better jobs the axiomatic nash bargaining solution and standard strategic bargaining solutions are inapplicable because the set of feasible payoffs is nonconvex i instead develop a strategic model of wage bargaining between a single worker and firm that is applicable to such an environment i show that if workers and firms are homogeneous there are market equilibria with a continuous wage distribution in which identical firms bargain to different wages each of which is a subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game if firms are heterogeneous i characterize market equilibria in which more productive firms pay higher wages i compare the quantitative predictions of this model with burdett and mortensen s 1998 wage differentials employer size and unemployment international economic review 39 257 273 wage posting model and argue that the bargaining model is theoretically more appealing along important dimensions

an equilibrium model of health insurance provision and wage determination we investigate the effect of employer provided health insurance on job mobility rates and economic welfare using a search matching and bargaining framework in our model health insurance coverage decisions are made in a cooperative manner that recognizes the productivity effects of health insurance as well as its nonpecuniary value to the employee the resulting equilibrium is one in which not all employment matches are covered by health insurance wages at jobs providing health insurance are larger in a stochastic sense than those at jobs without health insurance and workers at jobs with health insurance are less likely to leave those jobs even after conditioning on the wage rate we estimate the model using the 1996 panel of the survey of income and program participation and find that the employer provided health insurance system does not lead to any serious inefficiencies in mobility decisions

measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal health status measurement for use in economic appraisal of health care programmes is reviewed in this paper with particular emphasis on utility measurement a framework for economic appraisal is presented displaying the various components that must be measured and showing how the three forms of analysis cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis and cost utility analysis relate to the framework and to each other one of the components in the framework is health status it can be measured using ad hoc numeric scales willingness to pay receive or health state utilities the determination of health state utilities is reviewed covering the following issues alternative sources of utilities health state descriptions multi attribute utility approach determination of appropriate subjects utility aggregation and accuracy three measurement techniques for health state utilities are described in detail rating scale standard gamble and time trade off the use of these methods is described for both chronic and temporary health states and for both health states considered better than death and those considered worse than death

evaluating the validity of the dichotomous choice question format in contingent valuation hypothetical and actual cash willingness to pay wtp for an art print were elicited with dichotomous choice and open ended question formats comparing hypothetical and actual dichotomous choice responses using both a likelihood ratio test and the method of convolutions suggests we reject equality at the 0 05 but not the 0 01 level hypothetical wtp was roughly two times actual wtp with the dichotomous choice format there were no significant differences between the open ended and dichotomous choice question formats when both were used to estimate hypothetical wtp or both used to estimate actual wtp

models of mortality rates analysing the residuals abstractthe area of mortality modelling has received significant attention over the last 25 years owing to the need to quantify and forecast improving mortality rates this need is driven primarily by the concern of governments insurance and actuarial professionals and individuals to be able to fund their old age in particular to quantify the costs of increasing longevity we need suitable model of mortality rates that capture the dynamics of the data and forecast them with sufficient accuracy to make them useful in this article we test several of the leading time series models by considering the fitting quality and in particular testing the residuals of those models for normality properties in a wide ranging study considering 30 countries we find that almost exclusively the residuals do not demonstrate normality further in hurst tests of the residuals we find evidence that structure remains that is not captured by the models

how effective is public health expenditure in improving overall health a cross country analysis the primary emphasis of this paper is on seeking some justification for the worldwide phenomenon of increasing government involvement in health care the disability adjusted health expectancy dale rankings of countries in the world health report 2000 ranked wealthier countries with a typically large public sector involvement in health care higher on the list contrary to the possible implications for this ranking this paper finds that the comparatively higher dale in wealthier countries is not a result of greater public health expenditures in the middle income and less developed countries however there is some evidence of effective public involvement in health care

unemployment risk and wage differentials workers in less secure jobs are often paid less than identical looking workers in more secure jobs we show that this lack of compensating differentials for unemployment risk can arise in equilibrium when all workers are identical and firms differ only in job security i e the probability that the worker is not sent into unemployment in a setting where workers search for new positions both on and off the job the worker s marginal willingness to pay for job security is endogenous increasing with the rent received by a worker in his job and depending on the behavior of all firms in the labor market we solve for the labor market equilibrium and find that wages increase with job security for at least all firms in the risky tail of the distribution of firm level unemployment risk unemployment becomes persistent for low wage and unemployed workers a seeming pattern of unemployment scarring created entirely by firm heterogeneity higher in the wage distribution workers can take wage cuts to move to more stable employment

large firms and within firm occupational reallocation abstract this paper considers the equilibrium interaction between within firm and across firm reallocation in the presence of labor market frictions while a sizable literature has investigated frictional labor markets it has ignored within firm mobility nonetheless every year a sizable fraction of workers switch occupations without changing firms employees in large firms can sample from a larger selection and across firm mobility is replaced by within firm mobility bringing together within and across firm reallocation along with labor market frictions naturally accounts for the observed differences in worker flows and wages across firms of different sizes

are hypothetical referenda incentive compatible a comment in a recent article in this journal cummings al 1997 offer experimental evidence rejecting the hypothesis that a hypothetical referendum is an incentive compatible mechanism for obtaining the social value of or willingness to pay for changes in the allocation of environmental goods and services while cautions in offering a blanket rejection of hypothetical referenda as a means of measuring economic values on the basis of their findings the authors do suggest that at least in experimental settings respondents appear to behave differently when real money is changing hands wheather hypothetical situations adequately mimic real market situations has been debated in the contigent valuation literature since its inception see cummings brookshire and schulze 1986 cummings et al s finding of incentive incompatibility appears to offer strong evidence for the critics of hypothetical referenda

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

rising occupational and industry mobility in the united states 1968 97 we document and analyze the high level and the substantial increase in worker mobility in the united states over the 1968 97 period at various levels of occupational and industry aggregation this is important in light of the recent findings that human capital of workers is largely occupation or industry specific to control for measurement error in occupation and industry coding we develop a method that utilizes the psid retrospective occupation industry supplemental data files we emphasize the importance of our findings for understanding a number of issues such as the changes in wage inequality aggregate productivity job stability and life cycle earnings profiles