Marriage data show a strong degree of positive assortative mating along a variety of attributes. But since marriage is an equilibrium outcome, it is unclear whether positive sorting is the result of preferences rather than opportunities. We assess the relative importance of preferences and...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

The selection of immigrants by skill and education is a central issue in the analysis of immigration. Since highly educated immigrants tend to be more successful in host country labour markets and less of a fiscal cost it is important to know what determines the skill-selectivity of immigration....

The development of the unemployment rate differs substantially between OECD countries. In recent years some countries have experienced a mild increase, other countries have had a stable unemployment rate, while there are also ‘successful’ countries in which the unemployment rate has...

This paper analyzes behaviour on a TV game show where players' monetary payoffs depend upon an array of factors, including ability in answering questions, perceived cooperativeness and the willingness of other players to choose them. We find a substantial beauty premium and are able to...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese...

According to surprising raw data from the British Household Panel Survey, full-time women are more likely than men to be promoted. Controlling for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that women are promoted at roughly the same rate as men, but receive smaller wage increases...

This paper uses the retrospective work history data from the British Household Panel Survey to examine patterns of job mobility and job tenure for men and women over the twentieth century. British men and women hold an average of five jobs over their lifetimes, and one-half of all lifetime job...

The analysis uses a unique set of data matching mothers and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people’s educational attainments. The data is derived from the first five years (1991–5) of the British Household Panel Study. Mother’s education is...

We investigate two dimensions of investment in general human capital on-the-job: the number of workers trained and the intensity of training for each worker. In the benchmark case, we consider wage and training decisions made by firms in an imperfectly competitive labour market. The benchmark...