We investigate the effect of employer-provided health insurance on job mobility rates and economic welfare using a search, matching, and bargaining framework. In our model, health insurance coverage decisions are made in a cooperative manner that recognizes the productivity effects of health...

Building upon a continuous-time model of search with Nash bargaining in a stationary environment, we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare. Although minimum wage increases may or may not lead to increases in unemployment in our model, they can be...

One of the most striking changes in the U.S. economy over the past 50 years has been the growth in the service sector. Between 1950 and 2000, service-sector employment grew from 57 to 75 percent of total employment. However, over this time, the real hourly wage in the service sector grew only...

In this paper, we structurally estimate a sequential model of high school attendance and work decisions. The estimates imply that youths who drop out of high school have different traits than those who graduate, e.g., they have lower school ability and/or motivation, lower expectations about the...

The value of one in-kind transfer, food stamps, is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in Puerto Rico in 1982. The evidence indicates that the cashout of the stamps had no detectable influence on food expenditures. The explanation partly lies in the...