Women face unique challenges in starting and running their own businesses and may have differing motives to men for pursuing self-employment. Previous research suggests that married women with families value the flexibility that self-employment can offer, allowing them to balance their family...

We review patterns in migration within the US over the past thirty years. Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of...

This paper analyzes the role of connections in academic promotions. We exploit evidence from centralized evaluations in Spain, where evaluators are randomly assigned to promotion committees. We find that prior connections between candidates and evaluators have a dramatic impact on candidates'...

Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of...

We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion...

Although the share of female PhDs has increased explosively since the 1980s, little research has focused on the utilisation and remuneration of female versus male scientific human capital. Using rich Swedish cross-sectional register data on the stock of PhDs in 2004, this paper analyses to what...

Areas surrounding colleges and universities are often able to build their local stock of human capital by retaining recent graduates in the area after they finish their education. This paper classifies 41 U.S. metropolitan areas as "college towns" and investigates differences in employment...

College graduates are considerably more mobile than non-graduates, and previous literature suggests that the difference is at least partially attributable to college graduates being more responsive to employment opportunities in other areas. However, there exist considerable differences in...

Large regional disparities in health and healthcare costs prevail in many countries, but our understanding of the underlying causes is still limited. This study shows for the case of the Netherlands that population sorting through internal migration can explain a substantial share, around 28%,...