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The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it assesses motives for intended mobility among academics in institutions of higher education. Second, it investigates gender differences. Women have twice the intention to leave their institution than men during their first few years, but this difference narrows with seniority. Women report monetary reasons such as salary and promotion opportunities, as well as non-monetary reasons such as spousal employment to motivate their intended mobility. Gender differences across the reasons are minor once one controls for tenure status.

In this paper we provide estimates of the short-run elasticity of substitution between male and female workers, using data from Italian provinces for the period 1993–2006. Our identification strategy relies on a natural experiment. In 2000, the Italian Parliament passed a law to abolish compulsory military service. The reform was implemented through a gradual reduction in the number of draftees; compulsory drafting was eventually terminated in 2004. We use data on the (planned) maximum number of draftees at the national level (as stated in the annual budgetary law), interacted with sex-ratios at births at the provincial level, as instruments for (relative) female labor supply. Our results suggest that young males and females (who are those mainly affected by the reform) are imperfect substitutes, with an implied elasticity of substitution ranging between 1.0 and 1.4. Our results have important implications for the evaluation of policies aimed at increasing female labor market participation.

This volume is a collection of papers first presented at a conference held in June 2004 dedicated to the memory of the late Tikva Lecker, hosted by Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago. A warm and lively member of the Department of Economics at Bar Ilan University, Professor Lecker's many interests included topics in labor economics, women and the economy, the economics of Judaism, the economics of migration, and every aspect of the economic experience of immigrants and their descendants.

The analysis of any problem laden with social, economic and emotional burdens runs the inherent risk of misunderstanding. The issue of discrimination is, perhaps the leading behavioural issue of this generation, and as such it has a multitude of facts, myths amd emotions associated with it. Assumptions have been made about the nature and locus of discrimination which this article proposes to investigate.

Labor supply data seldom include detailed information on hours and wages in secondary job or overtime work. Based on survey information on hours and wages in overtime work and second job which is merged to administrative register information on income taxes and deductions we estimate a “Hausman labor supply model,” which allows for a detailed treatment of nonconvexities. Including explicit information on overtime pay and second job wages increase the estimated elasticities compared to a standard labor supply model without this information. However, allowing a more flexible treatment of nonconvexities the estimated elasticities are reduced; even below the estimates of the baseline results. In simulations we show that these findings have significant consequences when evaluating the degree of self-financing of various tax reforms.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.

Three empirical regularities characterize markets for married workers: (1) productivity and leadership potential are predicted by intelligence; (2) assortative mating based on intelligence characterizes marriages; and (3) labor force participation declines with spouse income more rapidly for married women than for married men. Taken together these characteristics imply that labor force participation will decline for women relative to their husbands as intelligence rises. These three observations suggest a nondiscriminatory explanation for the alleged under-representation of females among corporate leaders. They imply that the women who might be predicted to win the tournament for these positions often do not enter this competition. Instead they choose employment in full time household production. Both the three regularities and the implication concerning labor force participation are empirically examined. The findings of these tests are supportive on all counts.

In this chapter we study job design. Do organizations plan precisely how the job is to be done ex ante, or ask workers to determine the process as they go? We first model this decision and predict complementarity among these following job attributes: multitasking, discretion, skills, and interdependence of tasks. We argue that characteristics of the firm and industry (e.g., product and technology, organizational change) can explain observed patterns and trends in job design. We then use novel data on these job attributes to examine these issues. As predicted, job designs tend to be “coherent” across these attributes within the same job. Job designs also tend to follow similar patterns across jobs in the same firm, and especially in the same establishment: when one job is optimized ex ante, others are more likely to be also. There is evidence that firms segregate different types of job designs across different establishments. At the industry level, both computer usage and R&D spending are related to job design decisions.