We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the...

The rise in per-capita labor over the last 30 years is difficult to explain in a standard macroeconomic model because rising wages of women should have lead to a large rise in husband's leisure. This paper argues that home production and bargaining are both essential for understanding these...

This paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their...

Adverse selection in procurement arises when low-cost bidders are also lowquality suppliers. We propose a mechanism called LoLA which, under some conditions, is the best incentive-compatible mechanism for maximizing either the seller's or the social surplus in the presence of adverse selection....

One strategy for promoting female leaders in STEM professions is to appoint more women to the committees that select leaders. Unfortunately, evidence from other settings, such as committees for selecting judges or professors, suggests this approach does not work. We use a natural experiment to...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a 2-bidder asymmetric first price auction with affiliated values. The techniques used to prove uniqueness are different from the ones used in analyses of private values environments. Moreover the proof of existence is constructive. For...

This paper investigates information acquistion in decision problems. We introduce a new notion of "better information", Accuracy-order (A-order), defined on continuous families of signals. Accuracy formalizes the idea that "a signal that is more correlated with the unknown random variable is...

Job applicants with criminal records are much less likely than others to obtain legitimate employment. Recent efforts to address this problem include campaigns to persuade employers to hire applicants with a record voluntarily and legislation such as Ban the Box laws. The success of any remedial...

This paper develops a dynamic model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates personality traits, as measured by the "big five" traits. The model is estimated using the HILDA dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play an important role in explaining education and...