Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. After Prop 209, minority graduation rates increased by 4.35...

This paper investigates the role of productivity as a determinant of the worker's retirement intentions. Using an overlapping generation framework, we analyze the retirement decision of a cohort of workers being ability heterogeneous. The labor market is endogenously segmented between workers...

We show that information revealed by the occupation choices of spouses predicts marital dissolution. Using a novel measure of occupational distance constructed from the O*Net Content Model, we find that spouses more closely matched in terms of their occupations' requisite knowledge are more...

We model consumption and labor supply behavior of a couple in a non-cooperative setting. Using minimal assumptions, we prove that demand for public goods is characterized by three regimes. It is either determined by the preferences of one of the partners only (Husband Dictatorship or Wife...

In a prolific and illustrious career, the late Gary Becker (1930 - 2014) developed what he would later call "the economic approach to human behaviour". One of the most significant strands of that research was that which focused on human capital, occuping a significant part of his career,...

The Current Population Survey is used to investigate effects of Common Law Marriage (CLM) on whether young US-born adults live in couples in the US CLM effects are identified through cross-state and time variation, as some states repealed CLM over the period examined. Analysis based on Gary...

Using linked employer-employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects, we find that intensified competition significantly...

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academic outcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effort if school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that empirical estimates of the "total" effect of changes in school quality could be quite...

We investigate whether workers adjust hours worked in response to windfall gains using data from the European Household Panel. The results suggest that a rise in unearned income has a negative (although small) effect on working hours. In particular, after receiving a windfall gain, individuals...

We investigate whether nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurs share similar observable and unobservable skills. In JLE 23:649-680, 2005 "Jacks-of-all-Trades" model of entrepreneurship, individuals with more diverse academic and occupational training are more likely to become entrepreneurs, while...