J - Labor and Demographic Economics
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Human Capital Risk and the Firmsize Wage Premium
Why do employed persons in large firms earn more than employed persons in small firms, even after controlling for observable characteristics? Complementary to previous results, this paper proposes a mechanism that gives an answer to this question. -
The Effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on CEO Pay for Luck
According to the rent-extraction hypothesis, weak corporate governance allows entrenched CEOs to capture the pay-setting process and benefit from events outside of their control – get paid for luck. -
Unsecured Debt, Consumer Bankruptcy, and Small Business
In this paper we develop a quantitative model of entrepreneurial activity (risk-taking) and consumer bankruptcy choices and use the model to study the effects of bankruptcy regulations on entrepreneurial activity, bankruptcy rate and welfare. -
Uncertainty and the Specificity of Human Capital
This paper studies the choice between general and specific human capital. A trade-off arises because general human capital, while less productive, can easily be reallocated across firms. -
Schooling, Inequality and Government Policy
This paper asks: What is the effect of government policy on output and inequality in an environment with education and labor-supply decisions? The answer is given in a general equilibrium model, consistent with the post 1960s facts on male wage inequality and labor supply in the U.S. In the model, education and labor-supply decisions depend on progressive income taxation, the education system, the social security system, and technology-driven wage differentials. -
Education and Self-Employment: Changes in Earnings and Wealth Inequality
The author quantitatively studies the interaction between education and occupation choices and its implication for the relationship between the changes in earnings inequality and the changes in wealth inequality in the United States over the 1983–2001 period. -
Intertemporal Substitution in Macroeconomics: Evidence from a Two-Dimensional Labour Supply Model with Money
The hypothesis of intertemporal substitution in labour supply has a history of empirical failure when confronted with aggregate time-series data. -
A Search Model of Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, and Unemployment
The authors develop a search model of venture capital in which the number of successful matches of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs) at any moment in time is a function of the number of entrepreneurs searching for funds, the number of VCs searching for entrepreneurs, and the number of vacancies posted by each VC. -
Learning-by-Doing or Habit Formation?
In a recent paper, Chang, Gomes, and Schorfheide (2002) extend the standard real business cycle (RBC) model to allow for a learning-by-doing (LBD) mechanism whereby current labour supply affects future productivity.