We study the benefits of doing volunteer work when seeking employment opportunities. We do so by sending 2000 fictitious curricula to a large online platform of job offers in the United States. Half of these curricula are randomly assigned volunteer activities. We find that people who do...

The present article develops a search and matching framework to model political nepotism in the job market. The model argues that labor market friction generates incentives for the political leaders to provide nepotism under a democratic set up. Both the leaders optimally choose nepotism when...

From burqa ban to minaret ban, from right to detain suspected illegal immigrants to restricting the help to migrants, the number of social laws specifically targeting a tiny proportion of citizens has raised in recent years across Western democracies. These symbolic policies, we show, are far...

UN Sustainable Development Goal No.5 urges the attainment of gender equality and women empowerment by 2030. This has intensified the fight for gender parity and female empowerment in Africa with some successes. Despite this, changes in Ghana's educational system have not dispelled the widespread...

We develop a search model in which some employers hold unobservable racial prejudice towards black workers. Prejudiced employers may refuse to hire and may terminate black workers based on their prejudice. Workers do not observe employer prejudice, but they observe the race of their potential...

We apply the discrimination search model with wage-tenure contracts to NLSY79 data to study race/gender wage inequality with a focus on distinguishing unobserved productivity differences from discrimination in the labor market and also simulating the pattern of wage dynamics. Our findings...

We develop a job search model in which some employers hold unobservable racial prejudice toward black workers. Prejudiced employers may refuse to hire black workers and may terminate them based on their prejudice. Workers do not observe employer prejudice, but instead observe a signal of...

India has enacted several affirmative action policies since the 1990s to benefit the lower castes. This paper investigates if caste still affect an individual’s income in India today. Previous studies in this field have focused on specific regions or castes, and there is a dearth of pan-India...

Although racial inequalities are much researched, studies differ on the specific measure of individuals’ racial identity that they consider. This can affect the comparability of results across studies and, more importantly, the estimation of racial inequality in society. We estimate the extent...

Internships are an important and often mandatory part of academic education. They offer valuable insights into the labor market but can also expose students to negative aspects of the working world, such as gender pay disparities. Our paper provides first evidence of a gender pay gap in...