Knowledge that Transforms

Turnover falls with tenure, but wages do not always rise (and sometimes fall) with tenure. We reconcile these findings by revisiting an old issue: how gains from firm‐specific training are split between workers and firms. The division is determined by a stationary distribution of outside offers. The lower the wage a firm pays to a specifically trained worker, the more profit it makes but the more likely the employee is to leave. The optimal time paths of wages and turnover show that, if marginal product is increasing, wages need not be increasing but it always implies a falling turnover rate.

In many countries, an expired labor contract is automatically extended during the often‐protracted delay before the new contract is signed. Our theoretical model focuses on macroeconomic factors in explaining the delay. It emphasizes the importance of the realized nominal and real shocks, and of the levels of nominal and real uncertainty. The model is tested using Israeli collective wage agreements where long delays are frequent. The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical model. Thus, nominal uncertainty is found to increase the delay, and real uncertainty to decrease the delay, but less in the public than in the private sector.

There is renewed interest in ways to enhance secondary education, especially among disadvantaged students. This study evaluates the short-term effects of a remedial-education program that provided additional instruction to under-performing high-school students in Israel. The program targeted 10th ntwelfth graders who needed additional help to pass the matriculation exams. Using a comparison group of schools that enrolled in the program later and implementing a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we found that the program raised the school mean matriculation rate by 3.3 percentage points. This gain reflects mainly an effect on targeted participants and the absence of externalities on their untreated peers. The program was found to be less cost-effective than two alternative interventions based on incentives for teachers and students.

Many people are fired from their jobs for poor performance. However, it is difficult to distinguish whether they are fired because they are not well suited for their job (sorting explanation) or because the firms are trying to provide incentives for effort (incentive explanation). This article develops a dynamic incentive model of dismissal and proposes a methodology to distinguish between these two explanations. The methodology is based on learning‐by‐doing and changes in the slope of dismissal probability with respect to tenure. Using personnel data from a large U.S. company, this study finds significant evidence for the incentive explanation.

How does impatience affect job search? More impatient workers search less intensively and set a lower reservation wage. The effect on the exit rate from unemployment is unclear. In this paper we show that, if agents have exponential time preferences, the reservation wage effect dominates for sufficiently patient individuals, so increases in impatience lead to higher exit rates. The opposite is true for agents with hyperbolic time preferences: more impatient workers search less and exit unemployment later. Using two large longitudinal data sets, we find that various measures of impatience are negatively correlated with search effort and the exit rate from unemployment, and are orthogonal to reservation wages. Overall, impatience has a large effect on job search outcomes in the direction predicted by the hyperbolic discounting model.

In 1942, all Japanese were evacuated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps. To investigate the long‐run economic consequences of this historic episode, I exploit the fact that Hawaiian Japanese were not subject to mass internment. I find that the labor market withdrawal induced by the internment reduced the annual earnings of males by as much as 9%–13% 25 years afterward. This is consistent with the predictions of an economic model that equates the labor market withdrawal induced by the internment with a loss of civilian labor market experience or a loss of advantageous job matches.

This article analyzes firm and worker’s incentives to invest in general and specific training when these are separable in the production technology and wages are determined by the outside‐option principle. It is shown that firms pay for general training, while workers receive the full return on it, and firms and workers share both the costs and benefits of specific training. The case of delayed general training is also studied. When general training is delayed, it is shown that the strategic complementarity between specific and general training increases the worker’s incentives to invest in specific training.

This article measures the importance of job level assignment based on comparative advantage and learning about workers’ ability in explaining intrafirm wage and mobility dynamics using survey data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel. The results reveal the importance of nonrandom selection of workers into the rungs of the firm’s job ladder. Measured and unmeasured ability play important roles in workers' rank assignment, with unmeasured ability being more important at higher levels of the hierarchical job structure. There is some evidence of learning effects for workers below age 35 generating mobility between upper and executive levels.

This article considers the effect of offer matching on labor market outcomes when the current employer has better information about his worker’s productivity than potential employers. Previous research found that when current employers have better information than potential employers, the latter use job assignment to infer an employed worker’s qualifications. As a result, assignment of workers to jobs is inefficient. I find that when current employers can match outside offers, the equilibrium outcome may be efficient. I analyze the effect of the asymmetric information on investment in human capital made by employers and workers, and find these investment levels to be first best.

This article develops and estimates a model of wage determination that isolates the effects of alcohol use on wages as mediated through human capital accumulation. Although generally insignificant, estimation results suggest that moderate alcohol use while in school or working has a positive effect on the returns to education or experience, and therefore on human capital accumulation, but heavier drinking reduces this gain slightly. Based on these results, alcohol use does not appear to adversely affect returns to education or work experience and therefore has no negative effect on the efficiency of education or experience in forming human capital.