This paper estimates intertemporal labor supply responses to two-year long income tax holidays staggered across Swiss cantons. Cantons shifted from an system based on the previous two years’ a standard annual pay as you earn system, leaving years of untaxed. We find significant but quantitatively very small wage earnings with elasticity 0.025 overall. High earners and especially self-employed d...

The ability to speak and understand a host country’s primary language is strongly associated with measures of immigrant integration. We estimate the causal effects English training for adult immigrants on participants’ civic economic outcomes using randomized enrollment lotteries from public education program in Massachusetts. Participation doubles voter participation increases annual earnings ...

We study labor market returns to vocational versus general secondary education using a regression discontinuity design created by the centralized admissions process in Finland. Admission track increases initial annual income, and this benefit persists at least through mid-thirties, present discount value calculations suggest that it is unlikely life cycle will turn negative retirement. Moreover...

In a field experiment, we study how job seekers respond to posted wages by assigning randomly pairs of otherwise similar vacancies in large number professions. Higher attract significantly more interest. Still, nontrivial applicants only reveal an interest the low-wage vacancy. With complementary survey, show that external raters perceive higher-wage jobs as competitive. These findings qualitat...

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor its wage. We find most plants operate monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown 1.53, implying worker earning only 65 cents on the dollar generated. To investigate lo...

In skill-biased (de-skilling) technological revolutions learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (de-skilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow(fast-) to fast(slow-) learning workers, thereby reducing the relative and absolute wages of the former. The model of skill-biased (de-skilling) re...

In this paper a simultaneous-equations model of firm closing and wage determination is developed in order to analyse how wages adjust to unfavorable shocks that raise the risk of displacement through firm closing, and to what extent a wage change affects the exit likelihood. The results show that the fear of job loss generates bargaining concessions instead of compensating differentials. A nove...

The gift-exchange game is a form of sequential prisoner’s dilemma, developed by Fehr, Kirchsteiger, and Riedl (1993), and popularized in a series of papers by Ernst Fehr and co-authors. While the European studies typically feature a high degree of gift exchange, the few U.S. studies provide some conflicting results. We find that the degree of gift exchange is surprisingly sensitive to an appare...