This article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. I use data on engineers across Swedish private sector firms to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming, discrete choice model of employer choice. The differentiated firms are modeled in employer characteristic space, and each firm has its own age‐wage profile. A majority of engineers have moderately high switching costs and a minority of experienced workers are responsive to outside wage offers. Younger workers are more sensitive to outside wage offers.

I present the fact that wage gaps due to firm size increase with job responsibility. I use Swedish data to determine whether wage gaps increase with a direct measure of job responsibility, to compare the age patterns of the wage gaps for blue‐ and white‐collar workers, and to compare wages by job responsibility and spans of control. With U.S. data, I compare supervisory to nonsupervisory occupations and find that wage gaps increase with job responsibility for most occupational ladders. This fact is consistent with hierarchical matching models in which the larger number of subordinates amplifies managerial talent.

Estimates of the intertemporal labor supply behavior of males in Canada using micro data are reported. Individuals make the intertemporal labor supply decision on the basis of annual hours and weeks. Precision of the parameter estimates is improved by using tenure variables as instruments for the wage. Further, the age and tenure variables are allowed to have taste parameters in the structural equations. The evidence suggests that this is required only for the two age variables. Elasticity evidence suggests that evolutionary changes in the wage cause changes in the number of weeks with the elasticity being 0.6 and statistically significant.

A general stochastic model of optimal job separation behavior is developed in the paper. The model nests both the job training and the job-matching hypotheses of the wage-tenure relationship as special cases. The purpose of the paper is to compare the implications of the two hypotheses for job turnover. That expected wealth-maximizing separation strategies are qualitatively identical under the two hypotheses is the principal theoretical result. Although the empirical implications of the two hypotheses for observations on the distribution of completed job-spell lengths are similar as a consequence, they are not quite identical.

This paper discusses three independent inquiries into consequences of the rise in women's labor force participation rate (LFPR) in the United States since 1946. (1) The growth in women's LFPR is decomposed by decade, age, marital status, presence of age-specific children, and years of schooling. (2) Evidence on the impact of the growth on the inequality in income among husband-wife families is summarized and the impact on income inequality in other family structures is discussed. The effect on the level of family real income is considered and "money illusion" in measuring the change in income is noted. (3) Bivariate autoregressive time series are estimated with annual data from 1950 to 1980, indicating that lagged values of women's LFPR are systematically correlated with measures of flow fertility, marriage, schooling, and men's income, while only fertility has a strong, persistent lagged correlation with LFPR.

Classical approaches to estimation and decisions requiring estimation often are at odds. When values critical to the decision are convex or concave functions of unknown parameters, the statistician's estimation error adjustments are the opposite of what is appropriate for the decision. We illustrate the conflict by studying multi-period investment problems. The proper application of Jensen's inequality to the decision turns finance intuition on its head: Multi-period investments with negative risk premia can be profitable, risk-averse investors can have infinite demand for risky securities, settings exist in which risk-averse investors should not diversify, and demand for mutual funds with negative alphas may be rational.