Knowledge that Transforms

Daylight, television schedules, and time zones can alter timing and induce temporal coordination of economic activities. With the American Time Use Survey for 2003–2004 and data from Australia for 1992, we show that television schedules and the locations of time zones affect the timing of market work and sleep, with differences in timing being generated partly by returns to coordination with other agents. The responsiveness to time zone differences is greatest among workers in industries in national markets. An exogenous shock resulting from an area’s nonadherence to daylight saving time leads its residents to alter work schedules to coordinate with people elsewhere.

Using data from the New Immigrant Survey 2003, this article shows that skin color and height affect wages among new lawful immigrants to the United States, controlling for education, English language proficiency, occupation in source country, family background, ethnicity, race, and country of birth. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17% more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color. Taller immigrants have higher wages, but weight does not affect wages. Controls for extensive current labor market characteristics that may be influenced by discrimination do not eliminate the negative effect of darker skin color on wages.

We provide an explanation for peer pressure in teams based on inequity aversion. Analyzing a two‐period model with two agents, we find that the effect of inequity aversion strongly depends on the information structure. When contributions are unobservable, agents act as though they were purely selfish. However, when contributions are made transparent at an interim stage, agents exert higher efforts in the first period and adjust their efforts according to the interim information in the second period. This form of peer pressure reduces free riding, and thus more efficient outcomes are attained. The results are confirmed in a real effort experiment.

Consumption expenditure declines sharply at the time of retirement for many households, but the majority maintain a smooth consumption path. A simple life cycle model with uncertainty about the time of retirement can account for this pattern. A richer version of the model is calibrated to data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The median change in consumption expenditure at retirement generated by the model is zero, while the mean is negative, matching the HRS data. However, the magnitude of the drop in consumption among households that experience a decline is too small in the model compared to the data.

The famous events of May 1968, starting with student riots, threw France into a state of turmoil. As a result, normal examination procedures were abandoned, and the pass rate for various qualifications increased enormously. The lowering of thresholds at critical stages of the education system enabled a proportion of students to pursue more years of higher education than would otherwise have been possible. For those on the margin of passing their examinations, additional years of higher education increased future wages and occupational levels. Interestingly, the effect is also transmitted across generations and is reflected in the educational performance of children.

This article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men’s labor force participation rates observed since the mid‐1990s. Using data from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women’s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife’s participation decision on her husband’s participation decision. I then decompose the changes in older married men’s participation rates, demonstrating that husbands’ responses to increases in wives’ participation in the labor force can explain one‐fourth, one‐half, and one‐third of the increase in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, respectively.

We study the relation between workers’ skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique data set of Italian manufacturing firms with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker’s effect from a wage equation. We find that a firm’s productivity is positively related to skill dispersion within occupational status groups (production and nonproduction workers) and negatively related to skill dispersion between these groups. Consistently, most of the overall skill dispersion is within and not between firms. These findings are consistent with some recent hierarchical models of the firms’ organizational structure.

I revisit the intertemporal labor supply framework, using exogenous variations in daily weather to see how time at work varies with rain. In my model, a rainy day is associated with a lower enjoyment of leisure, effectively increasing wages and bringing more hours at work. I test the model using data from the American Time Use Survey, supplemented with daily weather. I find that, on rainy days, men shift on average 30 minutes from leisure to work. Computations give a rough estimate of the intertemporal elasticity of labor supply of around 0.01, in line with the rest of the literature.

According to U.S. Census and Current Population Survey (CPS) data, employed U.S. men are more likely to work more than 48 hours per week today than 25 years ago. Using 1979–2006 CPS data, we show that this increase was greatest in the 1980s, among highly educated, highly paid, and older men, and among workers paid on a salaried basis. We examine some possible explanations for these changes, including composition effects. Among salaried men, increases in long work hours were greatest in detailed occupations and industries with larger increases in residual wage inequality and slowly growing real compensation at “standard” (40) hours.

We examine the impact of maternity leaves on the period mothers are away from work postbirth and the likelihood they return to their prebirth employer. We use the introduction and expansion of statutory job-protected maternity leave entitlements in Canada to identify these effects. We find that modest leave entitlements of 17-18 weeks do not change the amount of time mothers spend away from work. In contrast, longer leaves do have a substantive impact on behavior, leading to more time spent at home. We also find that all entitlements we examined increase job continuity with the prebirth employer. (c) 2008 by The University of Chicago.