A growing empirical literature attributes much of the productivity advantages of large, "superstar" firms to their adoption of best practice management techniques that allow them to better identify and use talented workers. The reasons for the incomplete adoption of these "structured management...

We examine the impact of labor market power on firms' adoption of automation technologies. We develop a model that incorporates labor market power into the task-based theory of automation. We show that, due to higher marginal cost of labor, monopsonistic firms have stronger incentives to...

This paper analyzes the cyclical properties of worker flows in Brazil and Mexico, two important developing countries with large unregulated or "informal" sectors. It generates three stylized facts that are critical to the accurate modeling of the sector and which suggest the need to rethink the...

A gender differential in wages is considered to be discriminatory if the differential cannot be explained by gender differences in productivity. Numerous studies have been performed to measure the extent of gender wage discrimination in countries across the world, and most report a substantial...

This project studies collaboration in highly skilled, nationally diverse teams. An unexpected international political conflict makes national diversity more salient among existing and potential team members. I exploit this natural experiment to quantify the role of social, identity-driven, costs...

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...

This paper examines the role of work-life balance practices (WLB) in explaining the “paradoxof the contented female worker”. After establishing that females report higher levels of jobsatisfaction than men in the UK, we test whether firm characteristics such as WLB andgender segregation...

We use monthly personnel records of a large German company to analyse the gender wage gap (GWG). Main findings are: (1) the unconditional GWG is 15 percent for blue-collar and 26 percent for white-collar workers; (2) conditional on tenure, entry age, schooling, and working hours, the GWG is 13...

Using a two stage correspondence test methodology, this study tests employer priors against job-applicants with Arabic names compared to job-applicants with Swedish names. In the first stage, employers are sent CVs of equal observable quality. Thereafter, in the second stage, the CVs with Arabic...

The workforce in all industrialized countries is aging. To forecast future challenges,it is important to understand the impact of a worker’s age on the labor market. In thispaper, we analyze whether older workers in Germany and Norway are treated differentlyin the hiring process. Students and...