Vassar Scholarship

It is commonly believed that firms prefer layoffs to worksharing, in part, because layoffs economize on fringe benefit costs. We find that when labor markets are characterized by optimal implicit contracts, layoffs will never occur in equilibrium, regardless of the...

The traditional classroom presentation of international macroeconomic issues obscures the link between budget deficits, exchange rates, and the trade deficit. The article offers a simple supply and demand framework to clarify the role of budget deficits in creating trade deficits...

Implicit contract models of labor market equilibrium under work sharing and layoffs are constructed to examine several common explanations for the observed market bias in favor of layoffs. We first establish the optimality of work sharing in the absence of...

The decision whether or not to work for a temporary agency was examined using a 1990 cross-section survey of Illinois registered nurses and a model which corrects for the simultaneity between agency choice and wages (and benefits). Conditional on having...

Do temporary nursing agencies cause labor supply to nursing to be greater or less than it otherwise would be? Using cross-section survey data from 1984, 1988, and 1992, this question is examined within a nine-equation system capable of estimating hours...

A model incorporating a discrete full-time/part-time/do not work labor choice and decomposing labor supply into its full-time and part-time components was used to examine the increase in labor supplied by nurses (the increase per nurse on average) over the 1977-88...