Explore the vast range of titles available.

We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities. Third, the distribution of job offers is tailored to match workers' aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Our results suggest that macro elasticities may be substantially larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods.

\"One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data are scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out, and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt; historisch. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1940 bis 2005.

We investigate the effect of studying abroad on international labour market mobility later in life for university graduates. We exploit the introduction and expansion of the European ERASMUS student exchange programme as an instrument for studying abroad. We find that studying abroad increases an individual's probability of working in a foreign country by about 15 percentage points. We investigate heterogeneity in returns according to parental education and the student's financial situation. Furthermore, we suggest mechanisms through which the effect of studying abroad may operate.

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are \"coercive,\" in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employers, or \"guns,\" affect the participation constraint of workers. We show that coercion and effort are complements, so that coercion increases effort, but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare. Better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort: workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less. Greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort. We investigate the interaction between outside options, market prices, and other economic variables by embedding the (coercive) principal-agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup, and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion. General (market) equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by Domar, while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo-Malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism. In net, a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct (partial equilibrium) effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options. Our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off, conditional on enslavement, and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship-specific investment by workers.

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers' effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams. Strengthening incentives, either through rankings or tournaments, makes workers more likely to form teams with others of similar ability instead of with their friends. Introducing rank incentives however reduces average productivity by 14%, whereas introducing a tournament increases it by 24%. Both effects are heterogeneous: rank incentives only reduce the productivity of teams at the bottom of the productivity distribution, and monetary prize tournaments only increase the productivity of teams at the top. We interpret these results through a theoretical framework that makes precise when the provision of team-based incentives crowds out the productivity-enhancing effect of social connections under team production.

This paper empirically studies the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using data for more than 100 US occupations over the period 1997-2006. A model of firm behaviour based on separability allows derivation of the labour demand elasticity with respect to service offshoring for each occupation. Estimation is performed with quasi-maximum likelihood, to account for high degrees of censoring in the employment variable. The estimated elasticities are then related to proxies for the skill level and the degree of tradability of the occupations. Results suggest that service offshoring is skill-biased, because it increases employment in more skilled occupations relative to less skilled occupations. At a given skill level, however, service offshoring penalizes tradable occupations relative to non-tradable occupations. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers

Using March Current Population Survey data, we investigate married women’s labor supply from 1980 to 2000. We find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s, with little shift in the 1990s. These shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period. A major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women’s labor supply to their own and husbands’ wages: their own wage elasticity fell by 50%–56%, while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38%–47% in absolute value.

This study shows that in the UK, increases in unemployment in a recession are driven by rises in the separation rate. A new decomposition of unemployment dynamics is devised that does not require unemployment to be in steady state at all times. This is important because low UK transition rates - one quarter the size of the US - imply substantial deviation of unemployment from steady state near cyclical turning points. In periods of moderation, the job finding rate is shown to have most influence on UK unemployment dynamics. Evidence comes from the first study of monthly data derived from individuals' labour market spells recorded in the British Household Panel Survey from 1988 to 2008.

This article is a revised version of the lecture Peter Diamond delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec 8, 2010, when he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Less diligent search and greater willingness to wait for a future job make it harder for employers to find workers but easier for other workers to find jobs. The relative importance of these positive and negative feedback effects will vary with the large swings in the vacancy-unemployment ratio that happen over the business cycle, so the impact will be different at different times at times of high unemployment, a little less search by some workers will not have much impact on the difficulty of filling vacancies and so will have little effect on total unemployment. These effects on workers are externalities, affecting people with whom there are no direct transactions that might counter the effect. Thus, the natural rate of unemployment, coming from adding labor market frictions to a standard competitive model, is not generally an efficient level of unemployment. That is, having a worker search less and be more choosy about job acceptance as a result of unemployment benefits may raise or lower efficiency in the labor market.

The modern definition of unemployment emerged in the late 1930s from research conducted at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau. According to this definition, people who are not working but actively searching for work are counted as unemployed. This concept was first used in the Enumerative Check Census, a follow-up sample for the 1937 Census of Unemployment, and continued with the Monthly Report on the Labor Force survey, begun in December 1939 by the Works Progress Administration. A similar definition is now used to measure unemployment around the world.