Welcome to my website.
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. My research interests are Labour, Family, and Macroeconomics, with an emphasis on empirical application.
In September 2018 I will be joining University College Dublin as an assistant professor. As part of my duties I will be lecturing at Beijing-Dublin International College in the spring.
You can reach me at the following address:
kevin.devereux@mail.utoronto.ca
Teamwork is a major concern for any organization, but it is hard to distinguish a good team player from someone with high general skills. This paper provides a novel identification approach to measure a worker’s value-added from teamwork net of general ability. First I identify a given worker’s total value-added to a team by difference-in-differences, observing workers who switch teams. Define the portion of total value-added unexplained by solitary productivity as team skill: a worker’s comparative advantage at teamwork. Clean identification requires observation of a worker’s solitary productivity outside the context of any team. Professional men’s tennis provides a useful setting to compare solo work (singles) to teamwork (doubles). I find that nearly 60% of across-team output variation is explained by team skill. This is robust to a variety of specifications, including nonlinearities in player inputs. Players match positively assortatively by both own skill and team skill dimensions. This implies higher skilled players receive returns to skills by virtue of being matched to higher skilled partners; these are in the order of half the magnitude of the direct returns.
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.
