In this paper, we examine optimal job choices when jobs differ in the rate at which they reveal information about workers’ skills. We show that informational differences across jobs give rise to experimentation in that workers may be willing to sacrifice current period output in order to take...

In most models in which firms and workers learn about worker productivity through repeated observations of on-the-job performance, the amount of information revealed about workers is exogenously given and constant across jobs. In this paper, we examine what happens when the amount of information...

In this article, we examine optimal job choices when jobs differ in the rate at which they reveal information about workers’ skills. We then analyze how the optimal level of experimentation changes over a worker’s career and characterize job transitions and wage growth over the life cycle....

We model competition between risk-neutral principals who hire weakly risk-averse agents to produce a good of variable quality. The agent can increase the likelihood of producing a high-quality good by providing costly effort. We demonstrate that, when the agent is strictly risk-averse, the cost...

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic model of labor supply, occupational sorting, human capital accumulation and discrimination to explain the narrowing gender earnings gap from 1968 to 1993. The paper proves the model is identified and develops a three-step estimation technique....

This article considers the effect of offer matching on labor market outcomes when the current employer has better information about his worker's productivity than potential employers. Previous research found that when current employers have better information than potential employers, the latter...

This paper addresses two questions: What accounts for the gender gap in labor-market outcomes? What are the driving forces behind the changes in the gender-labor-market out- comes over the period 1968–97? It formulates a dynamic general equilibrium model of labor supply, occupational sorting...

The article analyzes the effect of employer-worker bargaining on wage dynamics in the presence of asymmetric information between current and potential employers. A failure to reach an agreement leads to output loss. Because the disagreement points depend upon the worker's productivity,...