Fixed Costs and Labor Supply

Fixed Costs, Retirement and the Elasticity of Labor Supply∗

We analyze the forces that can generate retirement in different versions of standard life cycle models of labor supply. While nonconvexities in production can generate retirement, we show that the size of nonconvexities needed increases sharply as the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for labor decreases. ∗We thank Eric French, Steve Davis, Yongsung Chang plus seminar and conference part...

Labor Supply and Child Care Costs: The Effect of Rationing

Labor Supply and Child Care Costs: The Effect of Rationing In Italy the participation of women has not increased very much in the last few decades relative to other developed countries and it is still among the lowest in Europe. The female employment rate stands almost 13 percentage points below the EU average and 22 below the Lisbon target. One of the most important reasons is related to the c...

Information Flows in Capacitated Supply Chains with Fixed Ordering Costs

Global and European Labor Costs

Multinational companies and national governments pay considerable attention to labor cost and labor productivity differentials across countries. This paper analyzes total and unit labor differentials for a group of European and non-European countries in the 1960-1998 period. It deals with (i) the magnitude of total labor cost differences (ii) the developments in unit labor cost and labor produc...

Relative Pay and Labor Supply

The authors use a laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in labor supply. They find that labor supply does respond significantly to relative pay, and in the expected direction. However, when a strong enough reaso...