The potential of Internet-enabled distance learning to transform higher education focuses attention on exactly what residential higher-education institutions do for and to their students. Two recent books marshal detailed quantitative and subjective data on individual student outcomes to document the effects of two institutions and how these outcomes might be improved. Paying for the Party concludes that a Midwestern state university reinforces existing economic inequalities rather than fostering upward mobility. How College Works finds that a northeastern liberal-arts college generally serves its students well and suggests low-cost improvements. These claims are evaluated.

Panel data suggest that women who subsequently divorce increase their labor supply in the three years prior to separation. A simultaneous model of future divorce probability and current labor supply is estimated for married women. The results support the hypothesis that divorce probabilities increase labor supply. Thus, the recent rise in the frequency of divorce may account for one-third of the unexplained increase in women's postwar labor force participation.

Journal Article The Demand for General and Specific Education with Occupational Mobility Get access William R. Johnson William R. Johnson University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 1979, Pages 695–705, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297036 Published: 01 October 1979 Article history Received: 01 August 1977 Accepted: 01 October 1978 Published: 01 October 1979

This paper analyzes a model in which fixed wages and layoffs may be the most efficient way to organize employment contracts. When wages fluctuate to reallocate labor among firms, workers must make costly decisions and may undertake excessive search. In contrast, if all firms reallocate labor with layoffs and new hires at fixed wages, only those workers laid off will have decisions to make. The lower decision costs of the fixed wage contract may more than compensate for the resource cost of the unemployment it causes. A novel feature of the model is the result that the socially optimal contract, when chosen by all firms, may not be the privately optimal contract.

I. Moral hazard, 693. — II. Adverse selection, 694.

I. Introduction, 261.—II. The basic model—risk neutrality, 262.—III. Mobility cost, 268.—IV. Education, 270.—V. Extensions of the basic model, 272.—VI. Empirical applications, 274.