This paper has three contributions. First, we document various facts about the labor supply decisions of men and women in the US over their life-cycle. For cohorts of male and female individuals in the PSID, we study the life-cycle profile of average hours worked, the variance of log hours, and...

We document an almost perfect negative correlation between the returns to experience and the average experience per worker in the labor market. We provide a model that rationalizes this finding. We consider workers as providing two distinct productive services - physical effort, or ``labor,''...

This finding is important for several active lines of research in macro/labor. For example, in the literature on the quantitative analysis of labor search models, it is the behavior of wages that distinguishes different calibration strategies with radically different implications. Current...