Consider a principal who appoints an agent. Let the agent potentially serve for a sufficiently long time that one principal is replaced by another over this period. Suppose also that the quality of the agent appointed increases with the effort the incumbent principal devotes to hiring. Then the...

This paper reviews the history of executive compensation disclosure and other government policies affecting CEO pay, and as well surveys the literature on the effects of these policies. Disclosure has increased nearly uniformly since 1933. A number of other regulations, including special taxes...

In recessions, unemployment increases despite the - perhaps counterintuitive - fact that the number of unemployed workers finding jobs expands. On net, unemployment rises only because even more workers lose their jobs. We propose a theory of unemployment fluctuations resting on this...

The aggregate matching (hiring) function relates gross hires to labor market tightness. Decompositions of aggregate hires show how the hiring process differs across different groups of workers and of firms. Decompositions include employment status in the previous month, age, gender and...

Building on a new data set which is combined from national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries, viz. France, Germany, the UK and the US, which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...

We propose a theory of skill mobility across cities. It predicts the well documented city size-wage premium: the wage distribution in large cities first-order stochastically dominates that in small cities. Yet, because this premium is reflected in higher house prices, this does not necessarily...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...