Knowledge that Transforms

This article examines the role of middlemen in bilateral search markets (e.g., employment agencies, real estate brokers). It is shown that the middleman narrows the set of buyer (firm) and seller (worker) types who search; seller types with high valuations and buyer types with low valuations drop out of the search market and instead trade through the middleman. The middleman also decreases the equilibrium search intensities of those agents who search. It is proven that the middleman improves welfare if search is very costly and inefficient and decreases welfare if search is effectively costless and very efficient.

We use the Current Population Survey to describe what we believe are the most salient aspects of labor force behavior of older men and women during the last 2 decades. First, we show that early retirement has increased dramatically, and this trend continued through the 1980s. Second, we show that the factors that most sharply distinguish propensities toward early retirement are those usually associated with low wages. Third, we show that trends in reduced participation for older men parallel those for younger men, while a pattern of increasing female participation is to be expected given the behavior of younger cohorts.

I use a large sample of jobs from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine job mobility patterns and to evaluate theories of interfirm worker mobility There are three main findings. First, the monthly hazard of job ending is not monotonically decreasing in tenure as most earlier work using annual data has found, but it increases to a maximum at 3 months and declines thereafter. Second, mobility is strongly positively related to the frequency of job change prior to the start of the job. Finally, job change in the most recent year prior to the start of the job is more strongly related than earlier job change to mobility on the current job. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

Broiler chickens are raised by contract growers whose rewards depend explicitly upon relative performance. The authors use data on the performance of broiler producers facing both tournament and linear performance evaluation compensation structures to test three predictions from the theory of tournaments: that changes in the level of prizes that leave prize differentials unchanged will not affect performance; that, in mixed tournaments, more able players will choose less risky strategies; and that tournament organizers will attempt to handicap players of unequal ability or reduce mixing to avoid the disincentive effects of mixed tournaments. Their evidence is consistent with each prediction. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

In this article, the authors examine the economic assimilation of immigrants to Canada. They provide new evidence on immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and document an increase in the dispersion of labor market outcomes across immigrants of different vintages over time. The authors' results confirm U.S. evidence of permanent differences across immigrant cohorts. What distinguishes the Canadian experience is small or negative rates of assimilation for most cohorts over the sample period. Finally, the authors test the overidentification of the assimilation process specified in previous studies and fail to reject the usual cohort fixed-effect specification. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

This article investigates error properties of survey reports of labor market variables. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) Validation Study, a two-wave panel survey of workers employed by a large firm that shared its detailed payroll records. Individuals' reports of annual earnings are fairly accurate. Errors are negatively related to true earnings, reducing bias due to measurement error when earnings are used as an Independent variable. Biases are moderately larger for changes in earnings. Earnings per hour are less reliably reported than annual earnings. Biases in estimating earnings functions are relatively small, but those in labor supply functions may be important. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.