The construction industry in the United States and other parts of the world has been facing several challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers. A review of the relevant body of knowledge indicates that one of the key reasons for this problem is the absence of human resource management strategies for construction workers at project, corporate, regional, or industry levels. This paper ad...

We study the effects of accessing better healthcare on the schooling and labor supply decisions of sick children in Tanzania. Using variation in the cost of formal-sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that accessing better healthcare decreases length of illness and changes children's allocation of time to school and work. Children attend school for more days per week-but not f...

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (1993) that this restriction is substantial because more sophisticated mechanisms can reach first-best allocations that are out of reach wit...

In this paper we examine the role played by environmental externalities in shaping the dynamics of an economy with two sectors (a farming sector and an industrial one), free inter-sectoral labor mobility and heterogeneous agents (workers/farmers and industrial entrepreneurs). We find that, in the presence of the environmental pressure of the economic activity of the industrial sector, the stabi...

We study the influence of the female labor participation in the household expenditure allocation, considering the joint decision between consumption and leisure. The theoretical framework is a collective model in which the agents are the man and the woman and it is assumed that the result of their decisions is Pareto-efficient. The change in expenditure-elasticities depending on the female labo...

Hundreds of papers have investigated how incentives and policies affect hours worked in the market. This paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation in the other two-thirds of the day. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1975 to 2004, we analyze the response of single women's housework, labor supply, and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income le...

We investigate how the gender composition of migrant flows and the intra-household allocation of labor are employed as risk-coping strategies in El Salvador. We show that agricultural productivity shocks primarily increased male migration to the US and, at the same time, increased the number of hours that the household devoted to agricultural activities. In contrast, damage sustained from the 2...

This note presents a random search and matching model with ex ante heterogeneity in worker productivity. A Social Planner with the power to prevent labor market participation by the least productive is shown to increase economic effi ciency. This is true even at the Hosios rule which, under worker homogeneity, implements the constrained effi cient allocation.

*Erasmus University Rotterdam; presently Visiting Project Associate. I have greatly benefited from the very stimulating research environment and m9-ny helpful discussions at the Institute. b ABSTRACT This paper outlines four existing theories dealing with income distribution and labor market allocation. Predictions on the proper specification of wage equations are derived and testing procedures...

A Beckerian model of household production is developed to study the cyclical allocation of capital and time between market and home activities. The adopted framework treats the business and household sectors symmetrically. In the market, labor interacts with business capital to produce market goods and services, and likewise at home the remaining time (leisure) is combined with household capita...