We exploit differences in European mortality rates to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they...

There is economic pressure to postpone the retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers. We investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory...

We estimate a principal-agent model of moral hazard with longitudinal data on firms and managerial compensation over two disjoint periods spanning 60 years to investigate increased value and variability in managerial compensation. We find exogenous growth in firm size largely explains these...

We introduce the idea that easily inferable demographic characteristics such as gender may not be sufficient to define type in the supervisor-employee mentoring relationship. We use longitudinal data on athletic directors at NCAA Division I programs to identify through observed mobility the...

Team production takes advantage of technological complementarities but comes with the cost of free-ridership. When workers differ in skills, the choice of sorting pattern may be associated with a nontrivial trade-off between exploiting the technological complementarities and minimizing the cost...

A manager and a worker are in an infinitely repeated relationship in which the manager privately observes her opportunity costs of paying the worker. We show that the optimal relational contract generates periodic conflicts during which effort and expected profits decline gradually but recover...

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the United Kingdom. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade. New results are also presented on the pay...