Current Table of Contents

• Human Capital Specificity: Evidence from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and Displaced Worker Surveys, 1984–2000
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 387-420, July 2008. <br/> Measures of four basic skills, constructed from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, are used to examine the source of human capital specificity. The measures are used to characterize the skill portfolio of each job and to construct distance measures between jobs. Wage losses in the Displaced Worker Surveys are shown to be more closely associated with switching skill portfolios than switching industry or occupation code per se. These switches represent large decreases in the skill portfolio in the postdisplacement job. The recent evidence for industry‐specific capital is reexamined. The results suggest a difference between fluid and crystallized skills.
• Job Changes and Hours Changes: Understanding the Path of Labor Supply Adjustment
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 421-453, July 2008. <br/> We use British panel data to investigate single women’s labor supply changes in response to three reforms that affected individuals’ work incentives. We use these reforms to identify changes in labor supply. There is evidence of small hours of work effects for two of such reforms. A third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers’ hours of work. The mechanism by which the labor supply adjustments were made occurred largely through job changes rather than hours changes with the same employer. This is little overall effect of the reforms on wages.
• The Intergenerational Effects of Worker Displacement
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 455-000, July 2008. <br/> This article uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement using a Canadian panel of administrative data that follows more than 39,000 father‐son pairs from 1978 to 1999. We find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9% lower than similar children whose fathers did not experience an employment shock. They are also more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social assistance. The estimates are driven by the experiences of children whose family income was at the bottom of the income distribution.
• A Rent Extraction View of Employee Discounts and Benefits
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 485-518, July 2008. <br/> We examine how firms can use employee discounts and perks to extract information rents from employees who have private information about their preferences and outside opportunities. The firm creates different bundles of the perk and salary in response to different employee characteristics and marginal costs of the perk. Strategic bundling can lead firms to provide perks even without a cost advantage over the outside market and to deviate from the marginal cost pricing. We characterize how optimal perk provision depends on the set of feasible contracts, on the perk’s marginal cost, and on the perk’s price in the outside market.
• Child‐Care Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada
  Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 519-548, July 2008. <br/> In 1997, the provincial government of Québec, the second most populous province in Canada, initiated a new child‐care policy. Licensed child‐care service providers began offering day‐care spaces at the reduced fee of $5.00 per day per child for children aged 4. By 2000, the policy applied to all children not in kindergarten. Using annual data (1993–2002) drawn from Statistics Canada's Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, the results show that the policy had a large and statistically significant impact on the labor supply of mothers with preschool children.