In this paper we use micro data from the Employment Opportunity Pilot Project (EOPP) surveys of firms in 1980 and 1982 to test for labor market rigidities and asymmetries in response to demand shifts.We analyze wage and employment adjustments to positive and negative shifts, as measured by sales growth between 1979 and 1981.The analysis is done for both entire sample of firms and for selected subsamples based on firm size, unionization, industry and skill mix.The results show that wage adjustments appear to be fairly rigid, compared with employment adjustments.They also appear to be quite asymmetric, with significant adjustments in response to positive shifts but little adjustment in response to negative shifts.These asymmetries are not more pronounced in large firms, manufacturing, heavily-waged or highly-skilled industries than in other firms or industries.pattern of asymmetry.

The presence of potentially binding constraints in rural labor markets is investigated by examining spillover effects on land market participation decisions. Farm and household data from ICRISAT village level surveys are used in a multinominial logit model that accounts for the simultaneous nature of the land and labor market participation decisions. Estimated parameters and likelihood ratio tests indicate that except for the presence of potentially binding constraint on the supply of female labor off the farm no other evidence of binding constraints is present in these villages. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

In recent years workplace smoking policies have become increasingly prevalent and restrictive. Using data from two large-scale national surveys, we investigate whether these policies reduce smoking. Our estimates suggest that workplace bans reduce smoking prevalence by 5 percentage points and daily consumption among smokers by 10 percent. Although workers with better health habits are more likely to work at firms with smoking bans, estimates from systems of equations indicate that these results are not subject to an omitted variables bias. The rapid increase in bans can explain all of the recent drop in smoking among workers relative to nonworkers.