Knowledge that Transforms

This article analyzes an experimental program that offered payments to unemployment insurance (UI) recipients who found a job quickly. The experiment provided exogenous differences in individual incentives which I use to test labor supply and search theories of unemployment. I examine predictions about the timing of exits from unemployment and the effect of the fixed-amount bonus on different wage level groups. I also argue that the experimental evidence does not show the desirability of a permanent program. A permanent program would sharply increase the compensation for short UI spells, likely increasing the claims rate and possibly increasing unemployment.

We use data from the Canadian 2-year longitudinal Labour Market Activity Survey of 1986-87 to estimate the effect of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system on job duration. Particular attention is focused on the "entrance requirements" of the UI system, which relate eligibility for UI benefits to an individual's recent employment history. The article makes operational the UI entrance requirement provisions which take into account variations in the regional unemployment rate. Controlling for many personal and job characteristics, we find evidence that a significant number of jobs terminate when they have reached the duration that would permit a UI claim.

This article explores a Census Bureau survey of the small business sector, the 1982 Characteristics of Business Owners survey, which contains information on both small businesses and the managers running them. A number of patterns are documented. For example, among small businesses of the same age, the probability that a business fails and the probability that a business is sold are both initially decreasing in the tenure of the manager at the business. Among businesses with managers who have the same tenure at their business, the probability that a business fails is decreasing in the age of the business.

Self-employed workers are less likely to be affected by implicit contracts, efficiency wages, and other forces that mute wage cyclicality and exacerbate employment cyclicality. This observation motivates our comparison of the cyclical experience of the self-employed with "wage and salary" workers who clearly have an employer. We find negligible or small differences in annual hours cyclicality between the two groups, but hourly wages and annual earnings are much more cyclical for the self-employed. These results are consistent with efficient contracting models where employers smooth workers' income without causing inefficiencies in hours of work.

Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who work in Israel generally earn more than Palestinians employed locally, but this wage premium is highly volatile. Beginning with the 1987 Palestinian uprising, changes in wage differentials by work location parallel Palestinian absences from work in Israel. This article interprets changing location differentials in response to exogenous shocks as movements along an Israeli demand curve for migrant workers. Estimates of a model of the West Bank and Gaza Strip labor market are used to evaluate the effect of policies governing Palestinian access to the Israeli labor market.

A recent (1990) national survey is used in an econometric analysis of Japanese women's hourly pay and employment patterns. It confirms many results from Western industrial countries but also indicates the important influence of Japan's unique family structure, the persistence of multigenerational households, on married women's employment patterns. Younger married women are more likely to take paid employment in such households, particularly on a full-time basis, than in nuclear family households. This appears to reflect in part the child-care role played by the woman's parents or parents-in-law.

This article concerns dual job holding and its link to job mobility. We present evidence from U.S. data on patterns of dual job holding, hours changes, and job mobility. We find that workers move into and out of second jobs frequently, that these movements are associated with large changes in work hours, and that hours constraints may prompt workers to take second jobs. Second, we review theories of dual job holding and present a stochastic dynamic model of dual job holding and job mobility in which decisions to take second jobs and/or change main jobs are made simultaneously.

In this article we estimate a spatial autoregressive multinomial probit model of the choice of location by general practitioners for establishing their initial practice. This model allows us to account for potential interdependencies among location choices. The model is used to assess the effect of various incentive measures introduced in Québec (Canada) to influence the geographical distribution of physicians across 18 regions. Our data set covers subperiods before and after the introduction of these measures. Incentive policies are captured through price and income effects. Our results provide evidence that these measures had a significant effect on location choices.

This article develops and tests a simple dynamic model of statistical discrimination. The model improves on earlier static models both by allowing ex ante uncertainty about worker productivity to be resolved as on-the-job performance is observed and by generating several testable empirical implications. These predictions are tested using a sample of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, producing mixed evidence for the model. The main empirical result is that no black-white wage gap exists at labor force entry but that one develops as experience accumulates, mainly because blacks reap smaller gains from job mobility.

A major issue in the analysis of unemployment durations concerns distinguishing genuine duration dependence of the exit rate out of unemployment from unobserved heterogeneity. We present a method for the nonparametric estimation of both phenomena, designed to be applicable to time-series data on aggregate outflows from different duration classes. The model explicitly takes into account that individual exit rates are affected by the business cycle and by seasonal effects. The method is applied to U.S. data. We find diverging duration effects among black and white individuals. However, except for white males, duration dependence is dominated by unobserved heterogeneity.