Labor Markets

A growing body of research has demonstrated an important relationship between work experience and teacher productivity. This implies that educational quality can be improved through reduction in turnover or acceleration of the return to experience. Mentoring has become an extremely popular policy to achieve these goals, but little is known about its general impact on teachers. I study the impact of mentoring on new teachers in New York City, which adopted a nationally recognized mentoring program in 2004.

We use six years of panel data on students and teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of recently hired teachers in the New York City public schools. On average,the initial certification status of a teacher has small impacts on student test performance. However, among those with the same experience and certification status,there are large and persistent differences in teacher effectiveness. Such evidence suggests that classroom performance during the first two years is a more reliable indicator of a teacher's future effectiveness.

The gap between the qualifications of New York City teachers in high-poverty schools and low-poverty schools has narrowed substantially since 2000. Most of this gap-narrowing resulted from changes in the characteristics of newly hired teachers, and largely has been driven by the virtual elimination of newly hired uncertified teachers coupled with an influx of teachers with strong academic backgrounds in the Teaching Fellows program and Teach for America.

This paper aims to provide a theory of current account adjustment that generalizes the textbook version of the intertemporal approach to current account and places domestic labor market institutions at the center stage. In general, in response to a shock, an economy adjusts through a combination of a change in the composition of goods trade (i.e., intra-temporal trade channel) and a change in the current account (i.e., intertemporal trade channel). The more rigid the labor market, the slower the speed of adjustment of the current account towards its long-run equilibrium.

This paper revists two basic questions that are critical for understanding and controlling DB pension risk: How should the value of DB pension liabilities be computed; and how should pension assets be allocated? In particular, we reexamine the role of stocks in valuing and hedging pension obligations. Our approach differs from others in the literature in at least two ways. First, it is one of the few that focuses on market value, and does so by using a derivative approach.

Time preference is a key determinant of occupational choice and investments in human capital. Since careers are characterized by different wage growth prospects, individual discount rates play an important role in the relative valuation of jobs or occupations. We predict that individuals with lower discount rates are more likely to select into jobs or occupations with steeper wage profiles. To test this hypothesis we use smoking as an instrument for time preference.

Although agency theory suggests that firms should index executive compensation to remove market-wide effects (i.e., RPE), there is little evidence to support this theory. Oyer (2004, Journal of Finance 59, 1619–1649) posits that an absence of RPE is optimal if the CEO's reservation wages from outside employment opportunities vary with the economy's fortunes. We directly test and find support for Oyer's (2004) theory. We argue that the CEO's outside opportunities depend on his talent, as proxied by the CEO's financial press visibility and his firm's industry-adjusted ROA.

Objective: The objective of this work was the investigation of the extent to which the introduction of new drugs has increased society's ability to produce goods and services by increasing the number of hours worked per member of the working-age population. Methods: Econometric models of ability-to-work measures from data on approximately 200,000 individuals with 47 major chronic conditions observed throughout a 15-year period (1982-1996) were estimated.

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the facts. The results show that although service outsourcing has been steadily increasing it is still very low, and that in the United States and many other industrial countries "insourcing" of services is greater than outsourcing.