This paper provides a normative justification for the use of a minimum wage as a redistributive tool in a competitive labor market. We show that a government interested in improving the wellbeing of the deserving poor, while being less concerned with their undeserving counterparts, can use a...

Air pollution affects workers’ ability to work by damaging their own health, but also by damaging the health of their dependents. This paper draws on 20 years of air pollution and employment data from Santiago, Chile, a highly polluted metropolis, particularly in fall and winter months. The...

This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental distress using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job losses in different segments of the Spanish labor market. Our results...

This paper analyzes whether teachers’ attention to boys and girls differs in low-performing schools in Chile, where large gender gaps in test scores are also observed. We coded 237 videotaped classes of fourth graders, identifying specific behaviors of teachers toward boys and girls. The...

The incidence of employment interruptions and temporary part-time work has grown strongly among full-time workers, yet little is known about the impact on wage inequality. This is the first study showing that such episodes play a substantial role for the rise in inequality of full-time wages,...

This paper investigates effects of appearance and religious practice of job applicants on the hiring decision. We asked participants in our laboratory experiment to select fictitious candidates for an interview from a pool of CVs with comparable characteristics but different photos. Some photos...

We analyze the short-run impact of the introduction of the new statutory minimum wage in Germany on further training at the workplace level. Applying difference-in-difference methods to data from the IAB Establishment Panel, we do not find a reduction in the training incidence but a slight...

Is BMI related to hours of work through marriage market mechanisms? We empirically explore this issue using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 and a number of estimation strategies (including OLS, IV, and sibling FE). Our IV estimates (with same-sex sibling's BMI as an instrument and a large set of...

In this paper, I use a unique dataset linking administrative school data with birth records to quantify the importance of time-varying family factors for child achievement and time use. Specifically, I take a model of academic achievement commonly used in the test score literature, and I augment...

This paper proposes a new measure of skill mismatch to be applied to the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The measure is derived from a formal theory and combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this...