This paper examines the role of social skills, as distinct from standard wage-determining human capital, in determining economic outcomes in labor and marriage markets. Social skill, or social capacity, is understood in our framework as the ability to maintain long-term relationships, whether...

Then, we build a theory of labor supply with heterogeneous agents consistent with these empirical facts.  The key features of the model are life-cycle, incomplete markets, nonlinear wage schedules, an intensive and extensive margin in labor supply, and a social security system.  We calibrate...

We argue that standard models with one-dimensional skills and human capital cannot explain these distinct patterns. Instead we develop a model in which human capital is occupation-specific, but in which non-routine occupations require upfront occupation-specific human capital built-up....

In this paper, we first use household survey data to documents facts on the heterogeneity and life-cycle dynamics of labor supply across many European countries and the U.S. We also document a substantial variation in the out-of-pocket medical expenses faced by individuals across countries. We...

The rapidly growing literature studying the returns to firm- and government-sponsored training has made a striking observation. Returns to firm-sponsored training are positive and large while returns to government-sponsored training are low or even negative, especially in the short run. This has...

This paper has three contributions. First, we document various facts about the labor supply decisions of men and women in the US over their life-cycle. For cohorts of male and female individuals in the PSID, we study the life-cycle profile of average hours worked, the variance of log hours, and...

There is a negative mean-dispersion relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours in that occupation. We document this pattern using data from the 1976-2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) and various Survey of Income and...

This paper studies the role of social security and tax and transfer programs for understanding cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle. First, we use the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) as well as the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to...

This paper studies the quantitative implications of wealth taxation (as opposed to capital income taxation) in an incomplete markets model with return rate heterogeneity across individuals. The key source of heterogeneity comes from the fact that some individuals have better entrepreneurial...

There is a negative mean-dispersion relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours in that occupation. We document this pattern using data from the 1976-2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) and various Survey of Income and...