Knowledge that Transforms

This article examines the effects of a change in the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan (C/QPP) disability benefits on the labor supply of older Canadian workers. I obtain my estimates by exploiting a large increase in benefits that only occurred in the QPP program, which only operates in Quebec, while benefits in the CPP program, which operates in the rest of Canada, were unaffected. Unlike the existing estimates from the United States, as well as earlier Canadian obtained by Gruber, I find that disability benefits are not associated with a large increase in the nonparticipation of older men.

Using the personnel records of a large British financial sector employer we investigate how workers respond to remuneration differences and “luck” in the promotion system. The results confirm that workers respond to larger remuneration spreads by working harder. Increased certainty in the promotion process also has this effect. There appears to be no difference between men’s and women’s reactions to promotion incentives. Gender differences in the raw data therefore appear not due to incentives. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation.

I develop a model in which different technological conditions lead to distinct equilibria with different patterns in labor mobility, promotion, earning distribution, and provision of firm‐sponsored training. Key is the asymmetric learning of workers’ characteristics. Because of the information that is conveyed to the market by promotion, firms have incentives to adopt strategic promotion policies, which result in different patterns in the use of internal labor market. The theory explains well the differences between the Japanese and the United States labor markets.

This article uses Survey of Households' Income and Wealth microdata to investigate the role the Scala Mobile played in the initial fall and subsequent rise in earnings inequality in Italy between 1977 and 1993. The Scala Mobile was a wage indexation mechanism granting the same absolute wage increase to all employees as prices rose, thereby potentially compressing wage differentials. Over time, the potential equalizing effect of this mechanism fell. This article argues that the rise in inequality from the mid‐1980s was a response to the compression of differentials operated over the previous years by the Scala Mobile.

This article identifies the part‐time wage effect, using hours variation caused by the social security rules. We show that work hours and wages drop sharply at ages 62 and 65. We argue that the hours decline causes the wage decline, resulting in a 25% wage penalty for men who cut their work week from 40 to 20 hours. However, we find little evidence for such an effect among women. We also show that models that fail to account for the joint determination of hours and wages will understate the labor supply response to a tax change by about 26%.

This article examines worker sorting across occupations in response to the risk of death on the job. We use family structure as a proxy for willingness to trade safety for wages to test the proposition that workers with strong aversion to this risk sort into safer jobs. We estimate conditional logit models of occupation choice as a function of injury risk and other job attributes. Our results confirm the sorting hypothesis: within gender, single moms and dads are the most averse to risk. Overall, differences in the risk of death across occupations explain about one-quarter of occupational gender segregation.

This article decomposes the participation process of a prototypical program into eligibility, awareness, application, acceptance, and enrollment. With this decomposition, we determine the sources of unequal participation for different groups and demonstrate that variables often have very different effects at different stages in the participation process. Our analysis shows that personal choices substantially affect participation and that awareness of program eligibility is a major source of variation in participation.

Using a confidential version of the NLSY79, we estimate large effects of neighborhood social characteristics and job proximity on labor market activity. A variety of neighborhood social characteristics are associated with less market work. Social characteristics have nonlinear effects, with the greatest impact in the worst neighborhoods. Social characteristics are also more important for less‐educated workers. Exploiting the panel aspects of our data, we find that estimates that do not account for neighborhood selection on the basis of time‐invariant and time‐varying unobserved individual characteristics substantially overstate the social effects of neighborhoods but understate the effects of job access.

This article examines the extent to which agency theory may explain chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Chinese state‐owned enterprises during the 1980s. We find support for the agency theory: CEO pay sensitivity decreases with the variance of performance. Moreover, the performance sensitivity of CEO pay increases with the marginal return to executive action. While the elasticity of pay to sales is slightly smaller than that found for conventional firms in the West generally, our estimate of the semielasticity of pay with respect to profitability is comparable with estimates for regulated industries in the United States.

This article provides theoretical and empirical analyses of a firing costs model with adverse selection. Our theory suggests that, as firing costs increase, firms increasingly prefer hiring employed workers, who are less likely to be lemons. Estimates of re‐employment probabilities from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth support this prediction. Unjust‐dismissal provisions in U.S. states reduce the re‐employment probabilities of unemployed workers relative to employed workers. Consistent with a lemons story, the relative effects of unjust‐dismissal provisions on the unemployed are generally smaller for union workers and those who lost their previous jobs due to the end of a contract.