Firms hiring fresh graduates face uncertainty on the future productivity of workers. Intuitively, one expects starting wages to reflect this. Formal analysis supports the intuition. We use the dispersion of exam grades within a field of education as an indicator of the heterogeneity that...

In Germany, around 80 to 90 percent of all inventions are created by employees. This leads to a conflict between the German principles of employment law and patent law. According to employment-law principles, the results of work are the property of the employer; the salary compensates the...

We report the results of a field experiment in which treated employers could not observe the compensation history of job applicants, whereas control employers could. We find no evidence that treated employers relied more heavily on alternative signals of productivity. Instead, they responded by...

This paper examines changes in the motivation of physicians at work since the start of the salary reforms in 2008. These reforms included a shift from a fixed salary system to performance-based remuneration and an overall increase in salaries. The data of six surveys of health workers from...

We examine the distinct effects of generalist-specialist versus insider-outsider attributes on Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation patterns. Our cross-sectional results show that each attribute has a significant impact on both the level and structure of CEO compensation. CEOs with a high...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies' exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the...

We document that firms whose compensation peers experience weak say on pay votes reduce CEO compensation following those votes. Reductions reflect proxy adviser concerns about peers' compensation contracts and are stronger when CEOs receive excess compensation, when they compete more closely...

Existing literature shows CEOs are rewarded for any positive component of income and are partially shielded from negative special items. However, the incidence of and rules pertaining to nonrecurring items significantly changed over the last two decades. I uncover that executives benefit less...

We investigate two-way causality between health and the hourly wage by employing insights from the human capital and compensating wage differential models, a panel formed from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and dynamic panel estimation methods in this investigation. We uncover a...

We examine the compensation of ethnic minority executives in listed US firms. The total pay of African American executives is 9 percent lower than that earned by Caucasians. This is due to lower base salary, lower bonus, and lower restricted stock grants. The lower bonus is due to a lower...