Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value employment in refugee camps Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals field experiment with three arms: control arm, weekly cash and arm equal value. raises substantially more than alone, 66 percent employed are willing forgo payments continue w...

Search frictions make worker turnover costly to firms. A three-month parental leave expansion in Sweden provides exogenous variation that we use quantify firms’ adjustment costs upon absence. The reform increased women’s duration and likelihood of separating from pre-birth employers. Firms with greater exposure the hired additional workers coworkers it coworkers’ hours, incurring wage correspon...

This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We induce hiring shocks—which employ 24 percent of the force external month-long jobs—in Indian local markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and aggregate employment declines. lean consistent with severe rationing, are unchanged, positive spillovers on remaining workers, indicating that over a quarter is rationed. At least...

Aggregate hours worked per working-age person decreased in Austria by 25% from 1970 to 2005. During the same time period, taxes increased, particularly the effective marginal tax rate on labor income. Using a standard general equilibrium growth model with taxes, I quantitatively assess the role played by the evolution of taxes on the evolution of hours worked in Austria. The model accounts for ...

Analyzing the Labor Market Activity of Immigrant Families in Germany This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein, upon arrival, an immigrant spouse invests in host countryspecific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family's current consumption. Using data for West Germany, we do not find evidence for...

Optimal Piecewise Linear Income Taxation Given its significance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex and nonconvex respectively. A numerical analysis of a discrete...

Why do some men father children outside of marriage without providing support? Why do some women have children outside of marriage when they receive little support from fathers? Why is this behavior more common among blacks than whites? We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage, employment, fertility, and child support decisions. We consider the extent to which low earnings, marriage ...

I study the impact of idiosyncratic risk on savings and employment in a small open economy populated by two-member families. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. Because of market incompleteness and information asymmetries, this cost coupled with labor market frictions can generate multiple equilibria. In particular, there might be one equilibrium with hi...

Universities are engaging in more licensing and patenting activities than ever before, and the amount of research funded by industry is increasing. Academics' commercialization activities may inhibit traditional academic scholarship. If the output of such scholarship is an important input into technological innovation and economic growth, then such an inhibition would be cause for concern. We i...

In important situations, individual decision-making is systematically biased. When deciding (rather than consuming), extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much effort into acquiring income and gaining status, lowering their utility level. These mistakes are accentuated in authoritarian sy...