This paper develops a theoretical model of optimal schooling levels where ability and family background are the central explanatory variables. We derive schooling demand and supply functions based on individual wealth maximization. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data, we stratify our sample into 1-yr full-time equivalent (FTE) work experience cohorts for 1985–1989. The est...

Accounting for Labor Demand Effects in Structural Labor Supply Models When assessing the effects of policy reforms on the labor market, most studies only focus on labor supply. The interaction of supply and demand side is not explicitly modeled, which might lead to biased estimates of potential labor market outcomes. This paper proposes a straightforward method to remedy this shortcoming. We us...

This paper examines the importance of labor market dropouts and selection bias in assessing black-white wage convergence by introducing a simple method of imputing wages to nonworkers. When nonworkers are included in the calculations, it is found that real wages of prime age black males increased less than 2 percent over the 1969-96 period in contrast to 9 percent wage growth observed among wor...

The Rise in Absenteeism: Disentangling the Impacts of Cohort, Age and Time We examine the remarkable rise in absenteeism among Norwegian employees since the early 1990’s, with particular emphasis on disentangling the roles of cohort, age, and time. Based on a fixed effects model, we show that individual age-adjusted absence propensities have risen even more than aggregate absence rates from 199...

We explore how slack time might drive the quantity and quality of creative projects. We model slack time as continguous blocks of low opportunity cost time. We model contiguous blocks of time as particularly useful for complex projects. The model predicts that more creative projects are produced during slack time because it is low opportunity cost time. The model also predicts that slack time g...

Children and Women’s Participation Dynamics: Direct and Indirect Effects Children affect the after-birth labor force participation of women in two ways. Directly, the time spent in child-care reduces the labor market effort. Time spent out of the labor market while on maternity leave alters women’s participation experience and indirectly affects subsequent participation behavior. This paper pro...

This paper contrasts labour participation behaviour and wages of native and immigrant women. Since the impact of family structure on labor supply differs between natives and immigrants, we explicitly distinguish between part-time and full-time jobs. The choice of jobs is accounted for by an ordered probit selection model with an incidental threshold, thus offering a flexible strategy to address...

Does Labor Legislation Benefit Workers? Well-Being after an Hours Reduction Are workers in modern economies working “too hard” – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime penalty that had become e...

Household Behavior and the Marriage Market There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses i...

This paper applies propensity score methods in order to investigate whether British female workers’ higher level of job satisfaction simply re‡ects a correlation due to the presence of systematic di¤erences in personal and job characteristics by gender or to a sample selection problem. The conclusion is that it does not, since it is found that there is a signi...cant positive e¤ect of being fem...