This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling; recent studies that use...

This chapter provides an overview of the methodological and practical issues that arise when estimating causal relationships that are of interest to labor economists. The subject matter includes identification, data collection, and measurement problems. Four identification strategies are...

One of the most striking features of European labor markets is the high incidence of longterm unemployment. In this chapter, we review the literature on its causes and consequences. Our main conclusions are that: the rise in the incidence of longterm unemployment has been "caused" by a collapse...

This chapter summarizes the empirical and theoretical research on executive compensation and provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description of pay practices (and trends in pay practices) for chief executive officers (CEOs). Topics discussed include the level and structure of CEO pay...

In this chapter, I survey principal econometric studies of several important labor market issues in Central and East European countries as they launched the transition from central planning to a market economy. The topics covered include employment, wage and fringe benefits determination in...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has...

There are large and important differences between blacks in whites in nearly every facet of life--earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. This chapter contains three themes. First, relative to the 20th century, the significance of discrimination as an explanation for racial...