The economic analysis of labor and employment law is a bold effort to apply economic theory to explain important empirical facts about the regulation of the employment relationship and to provide positive predictions and normative analyses that are useful to policy-makers. This book draws...

This paper reports the results of a survey of over 1500 employees who faced compulsory reductions of 10 percent in hours of work and earnings during the second half of 1985. The workers were asked how they used the free time and how they viewed the program, and their answers were analyzed in...

This paper considers the question of how to measure and interpret the financial return to investing in collectibles. We review various methodologies for creating priced indexes and then discuss studies that explicitly calculate a rate of return to some set of collectibles. While most...

We consider why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. In our formal model, agents first learn skills and then enter the marriage market. We show that wasteful behavior may emerge...

In premodern societies, the residence of a newly wedded couple is often decided by custom. We formulate a theory of optimal postmarital residence rules based on contracting problems created by the nature of premarriage human capital investments. We argue that a fixed postmarital residence rule...