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 characterizes efficient labor-market allocations in a labor selection model. The model's crucial aspect is cross-sectional heterogeneity for new job contacts, which leads to an endogenous selection threshold for new hires. With cross-sectional dispersion calibrated to microeconomic...

Firms increasingly delegate job screening to third-party recruiters, who must not only satisfy employers’ demand for different types of candidates, but also manage yield by anticipating candidates’ likelihood of accepting offers. We study how recruiters balance these objectives in a novel,...

We run an online experiment to study the origins of algorithm aversion. Participants are either in the role of workers or of managers. Workers perform three real-effort tasks: task 1, task 2, and the job task which is a combination of tasks 1 and 2. They choose whether the hiring decision...

Firms without paid employees account for up to 80% of all firms, but only a small minority ever hires. This paper investigates the relationship between labour costs and the decision to hire a first employee and become an employer. Leveraging a unique policy in Belgium that permanently reduced...

Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms and organizations. This paper studies how and why a candidate's interview outcome depends on the other candidates interviewed by the same evaluator. We use large-scale data from high-stakes admission and hiring...

Understanding discrimination is key for designing policy interventions that promote equality in society. Economists have studied the topic intensively, typically taxonomizing discrimination as either taste-based or (accurate) statistical discrimination. To reveal the limitations of this taxonomy...

Many occupations and industries are highly segregated with respect to gender. This segregation could be due to perceived job-specific productivity differences between men and women. It could also result from the belief that single-gender teams perform better. We investigate the two explanations...

Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

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...