By using a large new panel of individual data, including objective measures of worker performance, we provide some of the most rigorous evidence to date on several related dimensions of enduring debates surrounding upward-sloping earnings-tenure profiles. Most importantly we provide the first direct test of the relative validity of human capital and agency explanations in accounting for upward-sloping earnings-tenure profiles; our findings strongly support the agency view. Our second area of interest concerns employee ownership (many workers at our case are employee owners.) Consistent with agency theory we find that earnings-tenure profiles for employee owners are not upward-sloping but horizontal. In addition we find that pay-performance sensitivities are substantially weaker for employee owners than for other workers. Finally we investigate the impact of residential policies in China. We find that earnings-tenure

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The authors adopt the Five-Factor Model of personality structure to explore how personality affected the earnings of a large group of men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 and were re-interviewed in 1992. All five basic traits--extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience--had statistically significant positive or negative earnings effects, and together they appear to have had effects comparable to those commonly found for cognitive ability. Among men, substantial earnings advantages were associated with antagonism (the obverse of agreeableness), emotional stability (the obverse of neuroticism), and openness to experience; among women, with conscientiousness and openness to experience. Of the five traits, the evidence indicates that agreeableness had the greatest influence on gender differences in earnings: men were considerably more antagonistic (non-agreeable) than women, on average, and men alone were rewarded for that trait.

This paper examines the relationship between interethnic mar-riages and economic assimilation among immigrants in the United States. Two competing hypotheses are evaluated: the productivity hypothesis, according to which immigrants married to native-born spouses assimilate faster than comparable

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit

IZA is an independent nonprofit

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit

positions.

itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research