We model unemployment allowing workers to differ by comparative advantage in market work. Workers with comparative advantage are identified by who works more hours when employed. This enables us to test the model by grouping workers based on their long-term wages and hours from panel data. The...

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship may decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high level positions. Having too many older workers in society slows entrepreneurship. Older workers...

In this paper, we make the general point that econometric studies of the firm can be effectively and substantially enriched by using information collected from employees, even if only a few of them are surveyed per firm. Though variables measured on the basis of the answers of very few employees...

Firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. “Training contracts” that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. Using plausibly exogenous contractual variation from a leading trucking firm,...

This paper develops a model of skill formation that explains a variety of findings established in the child development and child intervention literatures. At its core is a technology that is stage-specific and that features self productivity, dynamic complementarity and skill multipliers....

In this paper we study how aggregate output responds to the arrival of a new General Purpose Technology (GPT) by looking at adjustment mechanisms that operate through labor markets. We show that under a wide set of circumstances the arrival of a new GPT that raises long-run output can trigger a...

Most of our productive knowledge was handed down to us by previous generations. The transfer of knowledge from the old to the young is therefore a cornerstone of productivity growth. We study this process in a model in which the old sell knowledge to the young - - old workers train the young,...

This paper demonstrates that even under ideal conditions, social experiments in general only uniquely determine the mean impacts of programs but not the median or the distribution of program impacts. The conventional common parameter evaluation model widely used in econometrics is one case where...