Knowledge that Transforms

There is ample evidence that incentive‐pay structures, such as tournaments, result in increased performance. Is this due to selection or increased individual effort, and is any increased individual effort caused by pecuniary incentives or merely thirst for the thrill of victory (TOV)? Prior literature has not separated the different effects. We look at performance in horse and dog racing and find that only horses, controlled by jockeys during the race, exhibit performance corresponding to pecuniary incentives, while both respond to selection and TOV. The results show that pay structures do matter.

We use unique longitudinal data to provide direct evidence about interracial friendships at different stages of college and to provide new evidence about some of the reasons for the observed patterns of interaction. We find that, while much sorting exists at all stages of college, black and white students are, in reality, very compatible as friends; randomly assigned roommates of different races are as likely to become friends as randomly assigned roommates of the same race. Further, we find that, in the long run, being (randomly) assigned a black roommate significantly increases the number of other black friends a white student has.

This article constructs and estimates a model of wage bargaining with on‐the‐job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match‐specific capital, and outside options. As the workers find better job opportunities, the current employer has to compete with outside firms to retain them. This between‐firm competition results in wage growth even when productivity remains the same. The model is estimated by a simulated minimum distance estimator and data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The results indicate that the improved value of the outside option raises wages by 14%–16% in the first 5 years.

This research examines the determinants of the match between high school seniors and postsecondary institutions in the United States. I model college application decisions as a nonsequential search problem and specify a unified structural model of college application, admission, and matriculation decisions that are all functions of unobservable individual heterogeneity. The results indicate that black and Hispanic representation at all 4‐year colleges is predicted to decline modestly—by 2%—if race‐neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race‐neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4‐year institutions by 10%.

In the context of certain models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. We use this strategy to estimate the elasticity of labor supply for men and women workers at a chain of grocery stores, identifying separation elasticities from differences in wages and separation rates across different job titles within the firm. We estimate that women have lower elasticities, so a Robinson‐style monopsony model can explain reasonably well the lower relative pay of women in the retail grocery industry.

Monopsonistic wage‐setting power requires that the supply of labor directed toward individual establishments is upward sloping. This study utilizes institutional features to identify the supply curve. The elasticity of labor supply is estimated using data for the Norwegian teacher labor market in a period where the only variation in the wage level was determined centrally and with information on whether there is excess demand or not at the school level. In fixed‐effects models, the supply elasticity faced by individual schools is estimated to about 1.4 and is in the range 1.0–1.9 in different model specification.

This article studies the effect of recruitment restrictions on mobility and wages in the postbellum U.S. South. I estimate the effects of criminal fines charged for “enticement” (recruiting workers already under contract) on sharecropper mobility, tenancy choice, and agricultural wages. I find that a $13 (10%) increase in the enticement fine lowered the probability of a move by black sharecroppers by 12%, daily wages by 1 cent (.1%), and the returns to experience for blacks by 0.6% per year. These results are consistent with an on‐the‐job search model, where the enticement fine raises the cost of recruiting an employed worker.

The Great Depression offers a unique laboratory to investigate the causal impact of migration on local labor markets. We use variation in the generosity of New Deal programs and extreme weather events to instrument for migrant flows to and from U.S. cities. In-migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, in-migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work or access to relief jobs. For every 10 arrivals, we estimate that 1.9 residents moved out, 2.1 were prevented from finding a relief job, and 1.9 shifted from full-time to part-time work.

This article investigates women’s and men’s labor supply to the firm within a semistructural approach based on a dynamic model of new monopsony. Using methods of survival analysis and a large linked employer‐employee data set for Germany, we find that labor supply elasticities are small (1.9–3.7) and that women’s labor supply to the firm is less elastic than men’s (which is the reverse of gender differences in labor supply usually found at the level of the market). Our results imply that at least one‐third of the gender pay gap might be wage discrimination by profit‐maximizing monopsonistic employers.