Many countries around the world are experiencing a significant shift in demographic patterns towards an older population. The age composition of the labor force has also changed dramatically, often accompanied by sharp reductions in the labor force participation rates of older workers. These phenomena in concert pose numerous challenges for the design of public pension programs and labor market...

Recent empirical work finds a negative correlation between product market regulation and aggregate employment. We examine the effect of product market regulations on hours worked in a benchmark aggregate model of time allocation. We find that product market regulations affect time devoted to market work in effectively the same fashion as do taxes on labor income or consumption. In particular, i...

Understanding whether labor market discrimination explains inferior labor market outcomes for many groups has drawn the attention of labor economists for decades – at least since the publication of Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination in 1957. The decades of research on discrimination in labor markets began with a regression-based “decomposition” approach, asking whether raw wage or ea...

I propose a framework to estimate the relation between age and productivity potential (a work performance measurement based on cognitive and non-cognitive skills and the labor market importance of these skills). This is done to show that the age–productivity curve is not necessarily static but can vary with changing labor market requirements. By basing the analysis on age variation in individua...

We study the effects of thickness and competition on the equilibria of ride-sharing markets, in which price-setting firms provide platforms to match customers (“riders”) and workers (“drivers”). To study thickness, we vary the number of potential workers (“the labor pool”) and, to study competition, we change the number of firms from one to two. When the market is sufficiently thick, wage and w...

BACKGROUND: The mental health services literature includes assertions that workers with mental illness are at earlier risk of unemployment than other workers when the economy contracts. This possibility is important for several reasons. One is that such a phenomenon would support the argument that the lives of mentally ill persons are made unnecessarily stressful by the stigma of mental illness...

This paper investigates whether and to what extent demographic change has an impact on human capital accumulation. The effect of relative cohort size and cohort composition on educational attainment of young adults in Germany is analyzed utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for West-German individuals of the birth cohorts 1962 to 1986. These are the cohorts which entered the labo...

This paper discusses the case for expanding active labor market policy in recession. We find that there is reasonable case for relying more heavily on certain kinds of programs. The argument is tied to the varying size of the lock-in effect in boom and recession. If programs with relatively large lock-in effects should ever be used, they should be used in a downturn. The reason is simply that t...

This paper examines the labor market value of the GED for females, questioning two implicit assumptions that have been employed in earlier studies. We show that providing access to work experience may be a critical mechanism through which education credentials impart labor market value and that the labor market value of the GED credential depends on the skills with which dropouts left school. O...

In this study we hypothesize that variations in state welfare policies in the reform era may affect adolescents through two mechanisms. A competing labor market hypothesis posits that stringent state welfare policies may reduce adolescent employment. A signaling hypothesis posits that stringent welfare policies may promote enrollment. To test these hypotheses, we use a dynamic joint model of ad...