We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing model explains the unemployment rate...

Using the Beginning Postsecondary Student Survey, we examine the effect on earnings of obtaining certificates/degrees from for-profit, not-for-profit, and public institutions. Students who enter certificate programs at any type of institution do not gain from earning a certificate. However,...

This paper briefly reviews the empirical evidence on labor market segmentation and presents some new results on the similarity of the pattern of segmentation across 66 different countries. The paper goes on to consider how unemployment might be understood in a labor market segmentation...