This is the first course in a three-course sequence in graduate labor economics. I will cover the following topics: (a) models of labor supply and time allocation; (b) models of human capital investment, education and the earnings function, with special attention to the models of self-selection; and (c) models of family and household formation and familial resource allocation decisions. In the subsequent courses in the graduate labor economics sequence, you will cover additional topics, including labor demand, labor market equilibrium and wage determination, compensating wage differentials, and many more. As a field, modern labor economics has drawn on neoclassical economic theory—of the consumer and firm, as well as the theory of compensating differentials—to guide its investigations, has been decidedly empirical, and has been the “proving grounds” for many advances in econometric methods. Modern labor economics has spawned a number of theoretical and econometric advances that have had impacts on research in other fields within economics and in other disciplines.

This course is not designed to provide a comprehensive survey of any of the areas that I cover. Rather, my treatment will place a good deal of emphasis on modeling and econometric methods. While not as thoroughly, we also will examine the empirical validity of many of the models we consider. Finally, in my lectures, I will focus on only a subset of papers the papers on my reading list or that we could cover. In addition to focusing on these papers, I will try to give you a sense of how these papers fit into the broader literature in the field and how they relate to other work that we will not be able to cover in class.

Detailed Course Syllabus Here in Adobe PDF format.  Last Posted 10/1/99.  (Go here to download the Acrobat Reader.)

Schedule for the Lectures in the Course are here in Adobe PDF Format. Last Posted 10/1/99.

I will also pick out papers that I will ask all students to read carefully and be prepared to discuss in class. For each paper that we discuss, I want students to be prepared to address the following questions (as they are applicable) about the particular paper:

1. What is the question or issues that this paper is seeking to address? That is, what questions or puzzles motivate the paper?

2. What is the background for the paper? That is, how does it relate to previous literatures?

3. What theoretical model or framework is being used in the paper? (Be prepared to provide a summary of the model.)

a) Does the model make sense? That is, does it seem to account for the behavior under in-vestigation?
b) Is it internally consistent?
c) Does the model discriminate itself from other explanations of observed phenomena?

a) What is the author trying to estimate and/or what hypotheses are being tested?
b) How does the author(s) obtain identification of the effects of interest?
c) What econometric methods are being used in estimation?
d) Do the methods being used seem appropriate?
e) Are the methods robust to the intrusion of various types of biases?

a) Do they make sense?
b) Are they convincing and robust ones?
c) Does the author(s) draw the correct inferences from their work?

7. What extensions, alternative modeling or estimation do you think make sense?

A List of the readings for the course and the location of the readings on the Internet are here. This readings site is password protected. Obtain the Name and Password for the couse from Professor Hotz or Gwen Matthews.

Handout #1 (in PDF format).

Information and guidelines are here.