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.

Individuals involved in basic research, like other workers, respond to incentives. Funding agencies provide implicit incentives when they specify the rules by which awards are made. The following analysis is an exercise in understanding incentives at an applied level. Specific rules are examined. What is the effect of rewarding past effort? What happens when a few large awards are replaced by many small awards? How does the timing of an award affect effort? How does an agency choose which topics to fund? Socially optimal rules are derived.

A unique dataset collected from the personnel records of a large company is used to study the relationship between on-the-job training and worker productivity. The analysis shows how information contained in a company database is useful for eliminating heterogeneity bias in the estimation of training's impact on wages and job performance. Even when selection bias in assignment to training programs is eliminated, training is found to have a positive and significant effect on both wage growth and the change in job performance scores, thereby confirming the robustness of the relationship between training and productivity.

"Analyzing the location choices of the post-1964 U.S. immigrants results in three main findings: (1) these immigrants are more geographically concentrated than natives of the same age and ethnicity and reside in cities with large ethnic populations; (2) education plays a key role in location choice, reducing geographic concentration and the likelihood of being in cities with a high concentration of fellow countrymen and increasing the probability of changing locations after arrival in the United States; (3) internal migration within the United States occurs more frequently among immigrants than natives and facilitates the process of assimilation for the more educated individuals."

This paper examines the role of state dependence in explaining the retirement status of older men. Following from the work of Heckman and others, apparent and true state dependence are distinguished in a dynamic retirement model. Using a 2-year longitudinal sample of men aged 58-62 in 1969, apparent and true state dependence are controlled for through estimation of an error-components model and a retirement-transition model. The results indicate substantial evidence of state dependence.

When unemployment insurance (UI) taxes are incompletely experience rated, a self-financing UI system has to impose additional taxes that are exogenous to the behavior of individual firms. In the United States, these nonrated tax components vary predictably over the business cycle. A model of firm behavior under such a tax is presented. Evidence suggests signs for the parameters of the model that predict that incomplete experience rating, while (as shown elsewhere) increasing the rate of temporary layoffs, leads to the use of multiple tax schedules in a way that exerts downward pressure on cyclical swings in aggregate unemployment.