Natives often fear that competition from foreigners in labour markets will cause wages to fall and unemployment to rise. These effects might actually be realized if natives and immigrants were substitutes. If they are complements, however, the result might be rather different. This paper...

The opportunity costs of rearing British children, in terms of cash earnings forgone by their mother, are estimated for a typical family. Data from the 1980 Women and Employment Survey provide estimates for hourly pay as a function of work experience and current hours of work. In addition, these...

Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of optimal executive compensation in a setting where managers are in a position to manipulate short-term stock prices, and managers' propensity to manipulate is uncertain. Stock-based incentives elicit not only productive effort, but also costly...

Using an original dataset describing the career history of some 16,000 senior executives and members of the non-executive board of US, UK, French and German companies, we investigate gender differences in the use of social networks and their impact on earnings. There is a large gender wage gap:...

This paper uses detailed information from a large wage survey in 2006 to analyze the gender wage gap in the performance-pay (PP) component of total hourly wages and its contribution to the overall gender gap in Spain. Under the assumption that PP is determined in a more competitive fashion than...

Why do firms delegate job design decisions to workers, and what are the implications of such delegation? We develop a private-information based theory of delegation, where delegation enables high-ability workers to signal their ability by choosing difficult tasks. Such signalling provides a more...

This Paper develops an account of the role and significance of rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting view of executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors that aims to maximize...

This Paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk-averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation to smooth...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of firm-level bargaining, along the lines of Manning (1993). In this context, we provide a firm level wage equation that explicitly accounts for firm heterogeneity. This wage equation explains inter-firm wage differentials by differences in labour...