We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the "property rights" approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human assets of...

Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to...

"We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners' dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers' fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple...

The current study examines earnings differences for practicing lawyers by undergraduate major with a focus on economics majors. Some majors do much better than others. Economics majors tend to do very well in both median and mean earnings, and both without and with controlling for individual...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

We examine gender gaps in career dynamics in the legal sector using rich panel data from one of the largest global law firms in the world. The law firm studied is representative of multinational law firms and operates in 23 countries. The sample includes countries at different stages of...

This chapter analyzes the effect of intangible investment on firm efficiency with an emphasis on its software component. Stochastic production frontier approach is used to simultaneously estimate the production function and the determinants of technical efficiency in the software intensive...

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other “research” activities, such as software. Second, argument still...