We formulate a model of household behavior in which cooperation is costly and in which these costs vary across households. Some households rationally decide to behave noncooperatively, which in our context is an efficient outcome. An intriguing feature of the model is that, while the welfare of the spouses is continuous in the state variables, labor supply decisions are not. Small changes in st...

I document differences in labor supply between a set of Latin American countries and the U.S. in the period 1990-2005. In the U.S. the female labor force participation was 69% by 1990, while in Brazil and Mexico was 39% and 37%, respectively. Females began to participate more in the labor market of these countries when more households acquired access to basic infrastructure and when distortive ...

Division of labor is one of the most basic and widely studied aspects of colony behavior in social insects. Studies of division of labor are concerned with the integration of individual worker behavior into colony level task organization and with the question of how regulation of division of labor may contribute to colony efficiency. Here we describe and critique the current models concerned wi...

Why some species become invasive while others do not is a central research request in biological invasions. Clonality has been suggested as an attribute that could contribute to plant invasiveness. Division of labor is an important advantage of clonal growth, and it seems reasonable to anticipate that clonal plants may intensify this clonal attribute in an invaded range because of positive sele...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization’s culture—specifically the trust environment—and its level of specialization. We show experimentally that exogenously imposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form. We prime trust and dem...

We formulate a model of household behavior in which cooperation is costly and in which these costs vary across households. Some households rationally decide to behave noncooperatively, which in our context is an efficient outcome. An intriguing feature of the model is that, while the welfare of the spouses is continuous in the state variables, labor supply decisions are not. Small changes in st...

Labor market wages do not typically provide an accurate or representative measure of the economic returns to child labor in rural settings, especially for women. This paper is a first attempt to identify other outcomes that can shed light on the longer-term impact of child labor. In particular, we examine the quality of marriage matches as measured by per capita household wealth and bride price...

From microbes to humans, the success of many organisms is achieved by dividing tasks among specialized group members. The evolution of such division of labor strategies is an important aspect of the major transitions in evolution. As such, identifying specific evolutionary pressures that give rise to group-level division of labor has become a topic of major interest among biologists. To overcom...

Division of labor is a striking feature observed in honey bees and many other social insects. Division of labor has been claimed to benefit fitness. In honey bees, the adult work force may be viewed as divided between non-foraging hive bees that rear brood and maintain the nest, and foragers that collect food outside the nest. Honey bee brood pheromone is a larval pheromone that serves as an ex...