Welcome to my website.
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. My research interests are Labour and Family economics.
My job market paper identifies a second dimension of human capital — teamwork ability — in an application to professional tennis.
You can reach me at the following address:
kevin.devereux@mail.utoronto.ca
Teamwork is a first order concern for any organization bigger than a single individual. This paper provides a novel identification approach to measure value-added from teamwork net of solitary work. Holding constant the assigned task, compare a worker’s contribution to output when acting alone versus when working in a team. The discrepancy between the two is that worker’s value-added due to teamwork, net of solitary work. The current application to professional tennis finds that over one-fifth of output variation is explained by team value-added. Players match assortatively along both own skill and team skill dimensions, but do not sort interdimensionally. Additionally, a specification test rejects the log additive production function, but finds this departure economically insignificant to decomposing output.
Even with falling divorce rates, between 30 and 40 percent of new marriages end in divorce. Recent divorcees – especially men but increasingly also women – tend to remarry very quickly. To the extent that marriage provides consumption insurance, and security to undertake costly investments such as raising children, the phenomenon of divorce and rapid remarriage prompts re-examination of the gains to marriage in terms of risk sharing. This paper explores marriage and divorce when individuals can engage in on-the-marriage search. Introducing on-the-marriage search allows us to match the rapid remarriage rates seen in US microdata as well as to explore the connections between infidelity, divorce, and remarriage that have attracted much attention in the sociology literature. In a second-best contracting world, the ability to search on the marriage (OTMS) has ambiguous and potentially important implications for the marriage as a consumption smoothing device and as a platform for making investments in children. We find that allowing for OTMS has variable effects on the first and second moments of consumption for different parts of the population, with women slightly worse off and men slightly better off when OTMS is allowed. Perhaps counterintuitively, OTMS also has a positive effect on fertility because it increases the attractiveness of having children for men in mediocre marriages.
