The copyright to this article is held by the Econometric Society,

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R01-HD32058-03, and the American Bar Foundation. Carneiro was funded by Fundacao Ciencia e Tecnologia and Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian. We have beneÞted from comments received

The availability of commercial quality, free software products such as the Apache HTTP (web) server or the Linux operating system has focused significant attention on the open source development process by which these products were created. One of the more perplexing aspects of open source software projects is why developers freely devote their time and energy to these projects. While many open source participants cite idealistic motives for participation, Lerner and Tirole (2000) argue that developer participation in open source projects may, in part, be explained by existing economic theory regarding career concerns. This research seeks to confirm or disconfirm the existence of economic returns to participation in open source development. Preliminary results of our empirical investigation suggest that greater open source participation per se, as measured in contributions made, does not lead to wage increases. However, a higher status in a merit-based ranking within the Apache Project does lead to significantly higher wages. This suggests that employers do not reward the gain in experience through open source participation as an increase in human capital. The results are also consistent with the notion that a high rank within the Apache Software Foundation is a credible signal of the productive capacity of a programmer. 1.

This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the concept of credibility

this paper by Bob Bies, Ronnie Goodstein and by our colleagues and students during a spring 1998 seminar. We also recognize the help we received from Stevan D. Mitchell on creating non-regulatory incentives for the private sector.

This paper analyzes statistical discrimination in a model with endogenous human capital formation and a frictionless labor market. It is shown that in the presence of two distinguishable but ex ante identical groups of workers discrimination is sustainable as an equilibrium outcome. This is true irrespective of whether there are multiple equilibria when the groups have no distinguishable characteristics. When an affirmative action policy consisting of an employment quota is introduced in the model it is shown that affirmative action can "fail" in the sense that there may still be equilibria where the groups are treated differently. However, the incentives to invest for agents in the disadvantaged group are better in any equilibrium under a±rmative action than in the most discriminatory equilibrium without the policy. Thus, the lower bound on the fraction of agents from the disadvantaged group who invest in their human capital is raised by the policy. The welfare effects are ambiguous. It is demonstrated that the policy may increase the incentives to invest and reduce the expected payoffs for all agents in the target group simultaneously. Indeed, the policy may hurt the intended beneficiaries even when the initial equilibrium is the worst equilibrium for the targeted group.

Business is modeled as interlocking social constructions that emerge in mobilizing differentiated production flows amidst uncertainty. The model is stochastic, non-linear, and sited in a network ecology for identities that have come to share a discourse which itself recognizes distinct levels of firm, market and sector * I am grateful for comments from Douglas White. Earlier draft versions were

ABSTRACT Research on the transition from post-secondary education to the labour market refers mainly to differences between academic and vocational tracks in secondary education. In this paper we analyse Israeli data focusing on the transition from different levels of post secondary degrees and from various fields of study to the labour market. We examine three labour market outcomes: employment status, occupational prestige attainment, and job match. Data are drawn from a supplement to the 1983 Israeli Census, which includes a random sample of Israel’s tertiary education degree holders (vocational and academic). Our central finding is that men who work in female-dominated occupations get better returns than women, and women who work in male-dominated occupations get better returns than men. We discuss several explanations of this finding.

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