This paper examines tax return-generated data on the labor force behavior of people
before and after they receive inheritances. The results are consistent with Andrew Camegie’s
century-old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person's labor force participation. For
example, a…

Standard models of dynamic labor demand rely on the presence of
adjustment costs to explain the observed smoothness in employment patterns,
although the costs are often difficult to quantify. The experience rating
feature of the U.S. Unemployment Insurance (UI) system…

We study strike durations and outcomes for some 2000 disputes that occurred
between 1881 and 1886. Most post-strike bargaining settlements in the 1880s fell
into one of two categories: either a union "victory", characterized by a
significant wage gain or…

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new
entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an
individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional
amounts of depreciable assets…

I use a sample of over fourteen thousand full-time jobs held by workers
in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine mobility
patterns and to evaluate theories of inter-firm worker mobility. The roles
of both heterogeneity and state…