The composition of immigrants depends not only on immigrant choice but also on immigration policy, because slots are rationed. Policy determines immigrant attainment, as evidenced by immigrants from Algeria having higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Theory predicts and evidence confirms that immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to population and education levels at home. A parsimonious specification has only two variables yet explains a majority of the variation in educational attainment of US immigrant groups. The theory and predictions are bolstered by Swedish data.

The theory below is that entrepreneurs must be jacks-of-all-trades who need not excel in any one skill but are competent in many. A model of the choice to become an entrepreneur is presented. The primary implication is that individuals with balanced skills are more likely than others to become entrepreneurs. Using data on Stanford alumni, the predictions are tested and found to hold. Those who have varied work and educational backgrounds are much more likely to start their own businesses than those who have focused on one role at work or concentrated in one subject at school.

In 1987, the Journal of Labor Economics published an issue on the economics of personnel. Since then, personnel economics, defined as the application of labor economics principles to business issues, has become a major part of labor economics, now accounting for a substantial proportion of papers in this and other journals. Much of the work in personnel economics has been theoretical, in large part because the data needed to test these theories have not been available. In recent years, a number of firm‐based data sets have surfaced that allow personnel economics to be tested. Using two such data sets, I give support to the implications of theories that relate to life‐cycle incentives, tournaments, piecework incentives, pay compression, and peer pressure. I conclude that personnel economics is real. It is far more than a set of clever theories. It has relevance to the real world. Additionally, firm‐based data make asking and answering new kinds of questions feasible. The value of research in this area is high because so little is known compared with other fields in labor economics. Questions about the importance of a worker's relative position in a firm, about intrafirm mobility, about the effect of the firm's business environment on worker welfare, and about the significance of first impressions can be answered using the new data. Finally, I argue that the importance of personnel economics in undergraduate as well as business school curricula will continue to grow.

Educators worry that high-stakes testing will induce teachers and their students to focus only on the test and ignore other, untested aspects of knowledge. Some counter that although this may be true, knowing something is better than knowing nothing and many students would benefit even by learning the material that is to be tested. Using the metaphor of deterring drivers from speeding, it is shown that the optimal rules for high-stakes testing depend on the costs of learning and of monitoring. Incentives need to be concentrated for those whose costs of action are high. For high cost learners this implies announcing the exact requirements of the test. For more able students, a more amorphous standard produces superior results. This is analogous to announcing where the police are when the detection costs are high. Other applications are discussed.

European countries have enacted various job security provisions over the last 30 years. Employers are required to pay workers on separation or to give advance notice of termination. In anything less than a perfectly functioning market, there are effects of the provisions on employment. Incumbents are more likely to retain their jobs, but new workers are less likely to be hired. An examination of the European data suggests that severance pay requirements reduce employment.

For almost 30 years now, most empirical work in labor economics has relied on human-capital theory to drive statistical specifications. A parsimonious structure, the theory has proved itself capable of generating rich, testable implications. Humancapital theory is primarily a supply-side approach that focuses on the characteristics and skills of the individual workers. It pays far less attention to the environments in which workers work. As such, the humancapital framework has led researchers to focus on one class of questions, but to ignore others. Specifically, little attention has been paid to the jobs in which workers are employed. The entire notion of a job, which seems central to the thinking of businesspersons and administrators, is virtually absent from most labor-market analyses. Standard production theory treats labor as a homogeneous commodity and ignores the slots or positions in which that labor is used. The institutional literature, and especially the work on internal labor markets, asks questions that differ from those asked by human-capital theory. The research agenda discussed below returns to the questions posed by the old internal-labor-markets literature (see especially Melvin Reder [1955] and Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore [19711). Directing attention to jobs also changes the kinds of analytic techniques appropriate for empirical analysis. Human-capital theory has created a large quantitative literature that is based on a few basic empirical methods. A jobs-based theoretical structure must also guide empirical methods, but the suitable methods often differ from those best for answering human-capital-oriented questions.