Old-age obesity is prevalent and increasing; there is no systematic research on the labor market outcomes of obese elders. Using the data on men aged 70-79 from the Health and Retirement Study and panel econometrics allowing for individual fixed-effects, we present evidence that obesity increases labor supply at old-age: an increase among the obese, compared to the normal weight, of 3.8 percent...

This paper analyses a bilateral trade problem with asymmetric information and ambiguity aversion. There is a buyer and a seller who bargain over the exchange of an indivisible good. The seller is privately informed about the quality of the good, which determines both his valuation and the buyer’s valuation. In the absence of ambiguity, the contract that maximizes the buyer’s payoff is a posted ...

This paper demonstrates the important role of job displacement in the household bankruptcy decision. I develop a dynamic, forward-looking model of unemployment and bankruptcy where persistent negative income shocks increase a household’s likelihood of filing for bankruptcy both immediately and in the future. Consistent with the model’s predictions, I find that households in the NLSY are four ti...

This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability. Product market competition is measured by the price-cost margin, and job instability is proxied by the intensity of the use of temporary contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey and …rm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instability rises with competition....

This paper provides a theory of wage inequality that hinges on entrepreneurship. The theory is motivated by new empirical findings. Among them, I document that in countries where barriers to entrepreneurship are high, wage inequality is low. As noted in the literature, differences in wage inequality across countries are, to a great extent, determined by differences in the skill premium, defined...

Job Market Signaling and Employer Learning This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive Criterion bites and information is purely asymmetric, the...

Evaluating the merits of alternative tax and incomes policies often requires knowledge of their impact on consumer demand and welfare. Attempts to quantify these impacts are complicated; aggregate demand responses depend on the population distribution of preferences for commodities, yet consumer preferences go unobserved and economic theory places few restrictions on their form and distribution...

With the current turmoil in the U.S. economy, it is more necessary than ever to ensure that graduates and employees have the skills necessary to compete in the job market. Previous research has looked at job advertisements in print and online media to determine skills that employers were seeking. That research has allowed only a relatively small sample of the jobs currently available to be anal...

We study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players connected in a network are randomly matched to bargain over a unit surplus. Players that reach agreement are replaced by new players at the same positions in the network. We prove that for each discount factor all equilibria are payoff equivalent. The equilibrium payoffs and the set of equilibrium agreement links converge as players be...

In this paper, we analyze the interaction between labour market conditions and education demand in a job matching model. Education is modeled as a process of self-discovery: schooling raises a worker’s likelihood of a good match to the job by helping him to find his comparative advantage. It is shown that there is a close relationship between education demand and job mobility.