The past century and a quarter has seen frequent improvements in track and field records. We attempt to estimate what proportion of the speed of record breaking is due to globalization (competitors from more countries) and what proportion is due to technological progress (better equipment and...

Turnover falls with tenure ¡ª this is one of the best established empirical regularities of labor economics ¡ª but finding a tenure effect on wages seems to be very hard. Within-job wage cuts do not seem very uncommon either. We reconcile these findings by revisiting an old question: how...

Time preference is a key determinant of investments in human capital and occupational choice. Individuals with higher discount rates are less likely to invest in human capital and hence more likely to select into careers with lower and flatter earnings profiles. Since discount rates are...

Abstact We present empirical evidence on gender disparities in wage returns to job tenure and experience. We find that the overall wage return on an extra year of labor market experience is lower for women than men. A decomposition analysis shows that the wage return to job tenure is...

A large portion of the variation in wages and wage growth rates among individuals is due to "unobserved" heterogeneity, and the source of individual heterogeneity is typically attributed to data limitations and/or the unobservability of certain productivity related factors. In this paper we...

Theories of turnover and wage dynamics have studied the impact of wage levels on turnover, but they have failed explicitly to model the role of wage growth in predicting turnover. This article presents a theory of turnover that explains why within-job wage growth reduces the likelihood of...

Time preference is a key determinant of occupational choice and investments in human capital. Since careers are characterized by different wage growth prospects, individual discount rates play an important role in the relative valuation of jobs or occupations. We predict that individuals with...