Current Table of Contents

• Why Have the Labor Force Participation Rates of Older Men Increased since the Mid‐1990s?
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 549-594, October 2008. <br/> This article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men’s labor force participation rates observed since the mid‐1990s. Using data from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women’s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife’s participation decision on her husband’s participation decision. I then decompose the changes in older married men’s participation rates, demonstrating that husbands’ responses to increases in wives’ participation in the labor force can explain one‐fourth, one‐half, and one‐third of the increase in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, respectively.
• When Is It Foolish to Reward for A While Benefiting from B?
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 595-619, October 2008. <br/> A performance measure may or may not reflect the relative importance of different tasks for the production of benefit: it can be aligned or unaligned. Here, I examine when using an aligned measure generates a larger surplus in a principal‐agent relationship than using an unaligned but otherwise identical measure. I find that (i) the agent’s effort costs matter for the optimal way of measuring performance, and (ii) the optimal measure is not aligned but tilted toward tasks that the agent finds easy. Failing to recognize these insights may lead to false predictions about the use of incentives.
• Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? A Cross‐Country Analysis of Gender Gaps
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 621-654, October 2008. <br/> We analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment. We recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques, simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median. We obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several OECD countries. However, this difference is small in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most central and northern EU countries and becomes sizable in southern EU countries, where gender employment gaps are high. Selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps.
• How Does Job‐Protected Maternity Leave Affect Mothers’ Employment?
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 655-691, October 2008. <br/> We examine the impact of maternity leaves on the period mothers are away from work postbirth and the likelihood they return to their prebirth employer. We use the introduction and expansion of statutory job‐protected maternity leave entitlements in Canada to identify these effects. We find that modest leave entitlements of 17–18 weeks do not change the amount of time mothers spend away from work. In contrast, longer leaves do have a substantive impact on behavior, leading to more time spent at home. We also find that all entitlements we examined increase job continuity with the prebirth employer.
• Transparency, Inequity Aversion, and the Dynamics of Peer Pressure in Teams: Theory and Evidence
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 693-720, October 2008. <br/> We provide an explanation for peer pressure in teams based on inequity aversion. Analyzing a two‐period model with two agents, we find that the effect of inequity aversion strongly depends on the information structure. When contributions are unobservable, agents act as though they were purely selfish. However, when contributions are made transparent at an interim stage, agents exert higher efforts in the first period and adjust their efforts according to the interim information in the second period. This form of peer pressure reduces free riding, and thus more efficient outcomes are attained. The results are confirmed in a real effort experiment.