When minimum down payments for durable purchases constrain a household’s debt, a persistent wage increase generates a liquidity shortage. This limits the income effect, so hours worked grow. This is the financial labor supply accelerator, which links labor supply to collateralized household borrowing. The mechanism generates a positive comovement of labor supply and household debt, whose streng...

The labor supply and other work incentive effects of welfare programs have long been a central concern in economic research. Work has also been an increasing focus of policy reforms in the U.S., culminating with a number of major policy changes in the 1990s whose intent was to increase employment and earnings levels of welfare recipients and other disadvantaged individuals. This paper reviews t...

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out” of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on female labor supply, and the effects on child well-being. The introduction of universal, highly-subs...

Survey measures of the reservation wage may reflect both consumption-leisure trade-off and job market prospects (the arrival rate offers distribution). We examine what a survey measure reveals about an individual’s willingness to trade leisure for consumption. To this end, we combine from large labor with one-hour that elicit in online experiment. The two show strong positive association. For u...