This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms’ job offer and workers’ job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show...

Since 1995, labor economists have reported on the income disparities between individuals who engage in same-sex behavior and those that do not. Many of these papers report a significant wage penalty, while others find no effect, but few look at the trend over time. We find, using National Health...

Using cross-industry survey data, I examine how the determinants of the pace of work affect the probability of using piece rates. Internal determinants raise the likelihood of piece rates, while response to external needs lowers the probability.

Empirical evidence shows that competition among firms generates steep incentives inside firms. Incentive pay stimulates productive investments but may generate inefficient rent-seeking investments. I show that competition reduces firms’ profits and thereby the inefficient investments, which...

This article investigates whether faculty members are rewarded for teaching. We find that teaching a wider variety of courses and devoting more time to teaching results in a significant wage penalty, even when research productivity is carefully controlled.

This paper shows that the fragmentation of bilateral donors’ aid across recipient countries tends to raise their transaction costs. It is estimated that bilateral donors could reduce their transaction costs by US$2.5 billion per year through greater recipient country specialisation.

We estimate the effect of Internet on the volume of used car transactions. From 1997 to 2007, Internet use tripled in California, causing an increase in volume-of-trade of 7.2 %. This implies a substantial welfare gain via improved allocative efficiency.

This paper addresses price transparency on the consumer side in markets with behavioral price discrimination which feature welfare reducing brand switching. When long-term contracts are not available, an increase in transparency intensifies competition, lowers prices and profits, reduces brand...

The ratio of within-group to between-group fighting is shown to be unrealistically high for the collective rent seeking model when agents exert two efforts i.e. within-group and between-group efforts. The ratio is more realistic for the production and conflict model. Six economics examples...

We present empirical evidence suggesting that the effect of the host country corporate tax rate on the debt ratio of multinational affiliates in developing economies is positive and larger than the same effect for affiliates in developed economies.