The paper documents important differences in payment for order flow (PFOF), spreads, and price improvement across asset classes. In stocks, we show that PFOF is small. While many retail trades are executed off-exchange, we find that they receive meaningful price improvement, particularly when...

This paper is concerned with three types of incentive programs. First, individual wage incentives that cause a worker's efforts to have a major effect on his pay. Second, group incentives in which the pay of an individual is determined by the output of a group of workers-a group can be as small...

Large and persistent differences across industries in wages paid for given occupations have commonly been observed. Recently, the efficiency wage model (EWM) has been advanced as an explanation for these wage differentials. The shirking version of the EWM assumes a trade-off between...

Japan has a relatively unique system of labor compensation. Most Japanese workers are paid large bonuses twice a year. This paper examines the cyclical movement of bonuses compared with wages and the relation of bonuses to employment in the context of the Weitzman "share economy." The paper...

This paper studies the real estate brokerage industry in Greater Boston, an industry with low entry barriers and substantial turnover. Using a comprehensive dataset of agents and transactions from 1998-2007, we find that entry does not increase sales probabilities or reduce the time it takes for...

Catastrophe bonds feature full collateralization of the underlying risk transfer, and thus abandon the insurance principle of economizing on collateral through diversification. We examine the theoretical foundations beneath this paradox, finding that fully collateralized instruments have...