What Do Fishermen Tell Us That Taxi Drivers Do Not? An Empirical Investigation of Labor Supply

Tess Stafford

Journal of Labor Economics, 2015, vol. 33, issue 3, 683 - 710

Abstract: Recent empirical findings have cast doubt on the neoclassical model of labor supply. However, estimation issues, and not workers' behavior, may be responsible for these findings. This paper investigates this possibility by examining the daily labor supply of Florida lobster fishermen. I invariably find that fishermen work more when earnings are temporarily high, behavior that is consistent with a neoclassical model of labor supply. Furthermore, methods that do not control for measurement error and endogeneity of the wage not only produce downward-biased estimates of labor supply elasticities but also generate a spurious negative and significant elasticity of daily hours.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/679682 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/679682 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/679682

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().