J31, J71, R23 </AbstractSection> Copyright Black et al.; licensee Springer. 2013

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that "the return to schooling" is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic-a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be...

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper...

US labor markets have experienced rising inequality over the past 30 years—as evidenced by an increased gap in wages earned by high-skill workers (e.g., college graduates) and low-skill workers (e.g., high school graduates). Empirical evidence documenting this evolution of inequality comes...

This paper documents a little-noticed feature of US labor markets—very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation. We start with a model in which commuting times...

We examine Becker's (1960) contention that children are “normal.” For the cross-section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the United States, we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly educated women living in similarly expensive locations, completed fertility is positively...

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the quot;property rightsquot; approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human...