How does information technology (IT) affect the organization of police work? How does it in turn affect police crime-fighting effectiveness? To answer these questions, we construct a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. We find that while IT adoption had substantial...

In this Paper we extend the standard human capital earnings function to include dispersion in the rate of return to schooling by treating the return as a random coefficient. One motivation is that if dipping further into the ability distribution has brought about the increase in supply of...

This Paper provides microfoundations for wage compression by modelling wage-setting in a world of heterogeneous workers and firms. Workers are differentiated by observable innate ability. A high-ability worker confers on a firm an externality, since their ability raises the average level of...

This Paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition; self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

We model educational investment and labour supply in a competitive economy with home and market production. Heterogeneous workers are assumed to have different productivities both at home and in the workplace. Following Rosen (1983), we show that there are private increasing returns to education...

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...