This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor its wage. We find most plants operate monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown 1.53, implying worker earning only 65 cents on the dollar generated. To investigate lo...

Why Are the Returns to Education Higher for Entrepreneurs than for Employees? We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19 waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and taking account of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than for employees (18.3 percent and 9.9 percent, respecti...

Causal Returns to Schooling and Individual Heterogeneity E-mail: In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West German full-time employed males (BIBB/I...

This paper investigates the link between domestic income inequality and international trade using a dynamic model of occupational choice. After showing how systematic patterns of comparative advantage arise among countries with no di®erences in their economic fundamentals, I provide two results regarding trade liberalization describing the full transition dynamics. First, international income d...

This article examines how research productivity, administrative service, and teaching affect reputational capital in the market for academic economists. Also, we investigate the issue of the durability of reputational capital, estimating the penalties associated with gaps in research output. Our results reveal that (1) the market makes a distiniction between the quantity and the quality of an i...

Opportunity Cost and the Incidence of a Draft Lottery Military conscription implicitly taxes draftees. Those who would have volunteered at the market wage may be forced to serve for lower wages, and those with higher opportunity costs may be forced to serve regardless, yet little is known about the distribution of this burden. We exploit the Danish draft lottery to estimate the causal effect of...

Universities are engaging in more licensing and patenting activities than ever before, and the amount of research funded by industry is increasing. Academics' commercialization activities may inhibit traditional academic scholarship. If the output of such scholarship is an important input into technological innovation and economic growth, then such an inhibition would be cause for concern. We i...

We develop a model of retirement and human capital investment to study the effects of tax and retirement policies. Workers choose the supply of raw labor (career length) and also the human capital embodied in their labor. Our model explains a significant fraction of the US-Europe difference in schooling and retirement. The model predicts that reforms of the European retirement policies modeled ...

In standard endogenous growth models, the higher the research e¤ort the higher is the innovation rate of the economy. Innovating, however, is a complex process that requires an entrepreneur to implement a valuable invention. Hence when research and entrepreneurial skills compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and R&D is hump-shaped. This paper proposes a m...

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least abl...