Human capital theory provides the generally accepted interpretation of the relationship between earnings and labor market experience, namely, that general human capital tends to increase with experience. However, there are other plausible interpretations. Search models, for example, generally...

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This paper tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained by...