We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 17 European countries and the US. Based on a model of joint household decision making, we quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes, as well as the educational composition, and gender wage gaps and educational premia, to the internat...

I propose a new measure of common, time-varying tail risk for large cross sections of stock returns. Stock return tails are described by a power law in which the power law exponent is allowed to transition smoothly through time as a function of recent data. It is motivated by asset pricing theory and is estimable via quasi-maximum likelihood. Estimates indicate substantial time variation in sto...

Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of exposure to the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. Variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the Chernobyl accident is considered as a random exogenous shock with which to try to establish its causal impact on poor health, labour force p...

Among the risk factors for hypertension, stress, especially work stress, has drawn increasing attention. Another potential work-related risk factor for hypertension identified in the past few years is work hours. This article presents an analysis of work hours and self-reported hypertension among the working population in the state of California. The data set used for this study comes from the ...

We clarify the empirical source of the debate on the effect of technology shocks on hours worked. We argue that the contrasting conclusions from level and difference VAR specifications are not primarily due to the presence or absence of a unit root in hours worked. Rather they are due to a small, but important, low frequency comovement between hours worked and labour productivity growth. This c...

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying countercyclical earnings risk (i...

A lack of communication between junior doctors and phlebotomists means untaken blood tests are often not recognised until late in a junior doctor's day, resulting in additional hours worked, delays in patient management, and potentially avoidable handover of additional work to on-call doctors. We set out to improve communication, with an aim that ward doctors should be made aware of patients wh...

Self-employed persons work in a less constrained environment than do most wage-and-salary employees. Generally they are not subject to compulsory retirement nor are they affected by institutional rules concerning labor supply. Data from the 1969 and 1971 interviews of the Retirement History Study show that the labor supply and retirement patterns of the self-employed are distinct from those of ...