As China exhibited unprecedented rapid economic growth ever since its reform andopenness, the development and sources of labor productivity has gradually come to theforefront. This paper studies the development and the source of labor productivity in 31Chinese provinces during the period of...

This paper examines the relationship between the brain drain and country size, as well as the extent of small states overall loss of human capital. We find that small states are the main losers because they i) lose a larger proportion of their skilled labor force and ii) exhibit stronger...

What are the performance benefits of investing in human resources in a low-cost laborenvironment where returns to such investment are widely perceived as negligible? This paperpresents a matched pair case study on the performance effect of human resourcemanagement systems at two garment...

Are ethnic specialization and thus a downward sloping labor demand curve fundamentalfeatures of labor market competition between ethnic groups? In a general equilibrium model,this paper argues that spillover effects in skill acquisition and social distances between ethnicgroups engender...

We present a general model of child labor that incorporates the various componentspresented in the literature as explanations for its existence. Our proposal is to mitigate thephenomenon by encouraging temporary emigration...

Do the short and medium term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalization influenceschooling and child labor decisions? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schoolingand decline in...

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, whichprovides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use thelessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance inpractice....

In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives.We design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the trueperformance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament...

On theoretical grounds, monitoring of top executives by the (supervisory) board is expectedto be value relevant. The empirical evidence is ambiguous and we analyze three noncompetingexplanations for this ambiguity: (i) The positive effect on firm value of boardmonitoring is hidden in stock price...

The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often placeemployees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second,demotions are extremely rare...