What factors affect the ways individuals participate in labor markets? "New Developments and Research on Labor Markets" (volume 4B) proposes answers to this and other questions on important topics of public policy. Leading labor economists demonstrate how better data and advanced experiments help them apply economic theory, yielding sharper analyses and conclusions. The combinations of these improved empirical findings with new models enable the authors of these chapters to reveal how labor economists are developing new and innovative ways to measure key parameters and test important hypotheses.

New Developments and Research on Labor Markets
1. Earnings, Consumption and Lifecycle Choices
Costas Meghir (University College London) and Luigi Pistaferri (Stanford University)
2. Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. (Harvard University)
3. Imperfect Competition in the Labor Market
Alan Manning (London School of Economics)
4. Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings
Daren Acemoglu and David Autor (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Institutional Reforms and Dualism in European Labor Markets
Tito Boeri (Universita Bocconi and Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti)
6. Local Labor Markets
Enrico Moretti (University of California at Berkeley)
7. Human Capital Development Before Age Five
Douglas Almond and Janet Currie (Columbia University)
8. Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility
Sandra E. Black (University of California, Los Angeles) and Paul J. Devereux (University College Dublin)
9. New Perspectives on Gender
Marianne Bertrand (University of Chicago)
10. Great Expectations: Law, Employment Contracts and Labor Market Performance
W. Bentley MacLeod (Columbia University)
11. Human Resource Management and Productivity
Nicholas Bloom (Stanford) and John Van Reenen (London School of Economics)
12. Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives
Paul Oyer (Stanford University) and Scott Schaefer (University of Utah)