In the middle of the nineties, the sharp increase in globalisation and the last privatization wave have promoted the shaping of a market for executives in France. Characteristics of this market are estimated for France and a competitive model is simulated in order to assess to what extend such a...

Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in...

We study a search model with employment protection legislation. We show that if the output from the match is uncertain ex ante, there may exist a discriminatory equilibrium where workers with the same productive characteristics are subject to different hiring standards. If a bad match takes...

Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. Another possible mechanism, employer discrimination, has found little support. In this paper, we provide some evidence in favor of the...

A large part of the literature on frictional matching in the labor market assumes bilateral meetings between workers and firms. This ignores the frictions that arise when workers and firms meet in a multilateral way and cannot coordinate their application and hiring decisions. I analyze the...

When information about the true abilities of job-seekers and applicants are hard to get, statistical discrimination by employers can be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage setting process. But statistical discrimination can induce costs, if labor relations cannot be terminated in 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...

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...

We use unique administrative data from a leading Italian University to estimate whether the use of admission tests and conditional progression schemes are effective strategies to select high-performing students. Previous work has mainly focused on the effect of selectivity policies on widening...

We assume that students can acquire a wage premium, thanks to studies, and form a rational expectation of their future earnings, which depends on personal ability. Students receive a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of...