To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

We investigate the hypothesis that complementarities across co-workers (which may arise from matching or investments in specific skills) affect the value of employment relationships between senior executives and firms. We analyze the changes in the composition of top management teams when a key...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

Many firms issue stock options to all employees. We consider three potential economic justifications for this practice: providing incentives to employees, inducing employees to sort, and helping firms retain employees. We gather data on firms' stock option grants to middle managers from three...

Using a detailed data set of employee stock option grants, we compare observed stock-option-based pay plans to hypothetical cash-only or restricted-stock-based plans. We make a variety of assumptions regarding the possible benefits of options relative to cash or stock, and then use observed...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

New graduates of elite MBA programs flock to Wall Street during bull markets and start their careers elsewhere when the stock market is weak. Given the transferability of MBA skills, it seems likely that any effect of stock returns on MBA placement would be short-lived. In this paper, I use a...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...