Jos van Ommeren

Estimating the Marginal Willingness to Pay for Commuting

With informational frictions on the labor market, hedonic wage regressions provide biased estimates of the willingness to pay for job attributes. We show that a recent theoretical result, which states that the variation in job durations provides a basis for obtaining good estimates, can be generalized to a wide class of search models. We apply this result by estimating the marginal willingness of employed workers to pay for commuting, using Dutch longitudinal data. The average willingness to pay for one hour commuting is estimated to equal almost half of the hourly wage rate.

Spatial Moving Behaviour of Two-earner Households

Economic theory suggests that job choice, residential choice and commuting behavior are simultaneously determined. The case of two-earner households deserves special attention because the two wage earners share a dwelling but have different workplaces. We base our analysis of spatial moving behavior on search theory. We demonstrate that job mobility depends positively on the distance between the workplaces of the two wage earners. Residential mobility seems to be negatively influenced by the distance between the workplaces of the two wage earners. The search model also indicates that two-earner households will, on average, move less often than single wage earners.

Impacts of Employed Spouses on Job-Moving Behavior

This article tests the hypothesis that on-the-job moving behavior differs for the type of household to which the worker belongs. In particular, the authors distinguish between the presence of a spouse and the presence of an employed spouse. They find that female workers with spouses, particularly when they belong to two-earner households, tend to change jobs less often than do other workers. The empirical results do not indicate that job mobility strongly depends on the spouse’s workplace location.

Gender differences in recruitment outcomes

The paper tests the hypothesis that female applicants have a lower probability of being hired from a pool of applicants than their male counterparts. The results indicate that male and female candidates have about the same probability of being hired independently of the type of vacancy. The probability of hiring a candidate of a certain sex is therefore determined by the gender composition of the pool of applicants who have selected themselves on the basis of job characteristics, hiring standards and the type of sector. This indicates that male and female job-seekers select themselves in such a way that they have equal probabilities of being accepted. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research