Using data from a large U.S. retail firm, we examine how racial matches between managers and their employees affect rates of employee quits, dismissals, and promotions. We exploit changes in management at hundreds of stores to estimate hazard models with store fixed effects that control for all...

Affirmative action goals and timetables have been criticized by some as being ineffective and by others as being a system of rigid quotas. In this paper I present estimates of the impact of detailed regulatory pressure on goals and on subsequent demographics. While the goals are inflated and are...

This study estimates the changes over time in the relative productivities of minorities and females. I find no significant evidence that the productivity of minorities or females decreased relative to that of white males as relative minority and female employment increased during the 1960s and...

Most previous studies of intergenerational transmission of human capital are restricted to two generations: how parents influence their children. In this study, we use a Swedish data set that links individual measures of lifetime earnings for three generations and data on educational attainment...

We analyze the effect of economic incentives on worker absenteeism, using panel data on work absence for 1990 and 1991 with a sample of 1,396 Swedish blue-collar workers. During this period Sweden implemented major reforms of both its national income replacement program for short-term sickness...

This paper reviews some of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics: social experiments, natural experiments, matching, instrumental variables, discontinuity design, and control functions. It discusses identification of traditionally used average parameters and more...

In this paper, we describe the household wealth distribution in the United States and United Kingdom over the past two decades, and compare both wealth inequality and the form in which wealth is held. Unconditionally, there are large differences in financial wealth between the two countries at...

We consider the implementation of Kernel methods in empirical microeconomics with specific application to Engel curve estimation in the analysis of consumer behavior. A set of recently developed tests for the parametric null hypothesis against a nonparametric alternative are discussed and...

This paper considers the use of instrumental variables to identify a correlated random coefficients model in which coefficients are correlated with (or stochastically dependent on) the regressors. A correlated random coefficients model is central to the human capital earnings model. Conditions...