Opportunity Cost and the Incidence of a Draft Lottery Military conscription implicitly taxes draftees. Those who would have volunteered at the market wage may be forced to serve for lower wages, and those with higher opportunity costs may be forced to serve regardless, yet little is known about the distribution of this burden. We exploit the Danish draft lottery to estimate the causal effect of...

Universities are engaging in more licensing and patenting activities than ever before, and the amount of research funded by industry is increasing. Academics' commercialization activities may inhibit traditional academic scholarship. If the output of such scholarship is an important input into technological innovation and economic growth, then such an inhibition would be cause for concern. We i...

We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in schooling and retirement. The model predicts that reforms of the European retirement policies modeled ...

In standard endogenous growth models, the higher the research e¤ort the higher is the innovation rate of the economy. Innovating, however, is a complex process that requires an entrepreneur to implement a valuable invention. Hence when research and entrepreneurial skills compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and R&D is hump-shaped. This paper proposes a m...

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least abl...

Using data from representative population surveys in 17 countries, we find that the lower rate of female business ownership is primarily due to women’s lower propensity to start businesses rather than to differences in survival rates across genders. We show that women are less confident in their entrepreneurial skills, have different social networks and exhibit higher fear of failure than men. ...

Migration, Transfers and Child Labor We examine agricultural child labor in the context of emigration, transfers, and the ability to hire outside labor. We start by developing a theoretical background based on Basu and Van, (1998), Basu, (1999) and Epstein and Kahana (2008) and show how hiring labor from outside the household and transfers to the household might induce a reduction in children’s...

This paper develops and estimates a simple on-the-job search model with skills accumulation. In our model, contrary to previous works, skills are not fully firm-specific nor general but partially transferable. When a worker experience a job transition from firm A to firmB a fraction τ of the skills are lost where τ depends on some distance between firm A and B. In this framework the interaction...

This article analyzes the impact of stochastic skill-biased technological change on earnings inequality in a general equilibrium OLG model. Wage dispersion is determined by the heterogeneity of skills by allowing for productivity differences due to education, ability, and age. The model performs well in reproducing stylized facts on the time pattern of the U.S. wage distribution and human capit...

This paper examines the incentive effects of different payoff structures in the National Hockey League. A rule change prior to the 1999-2000 season, which changed the way that teams were awarded points in overtime games, provides a natural experiment to test the reaction of teams to a change in the payoff structure. The rule change had the desired effect of increasing excitement during overtime...