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...

This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing...

Almost universally, the Oaxaca (1973) decomposition is used to compare the outcomes between two discrete groups, e.g., black and white. In many applications, however, groups are not readily divided into discrete bins. The purpose of this paper is to extend the Oaxaca decomposition to examine...

We offer a model that combines a knowledge based organizational structure with progressive learning of employees’ talent. We show that higher span of control is associated with better selected managers, higher wages, higher probability to be promoted, and higher turn-over in the early career...

With data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics I show that individuals in performance pay jobs were much less likely to be unemployed at the time of the interview than those in “fixed” wage jobs during the 2008 recession. While their unemployment rate is always lower in non-recession...

We study the retention effects of the Australian military’s decision to remove a 20-year cliff-vesting requirement from their retirement system in 1991. We follow to the present individuals who self-selected into and out of the 20-year cliff-vesting plan, as well as those who were forced out...

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...

This paper investigates how compensation structure affects performance in a simple but effort-consuming task. In this experimental study, the subjects were asked to multiply two-digit numbers for 40 min and were paid using either a linear (with different pay for performance sensitivities) or a...

We show that a team may favor self-sabotage to influence the principal’s contract decision. Sabotage increases a team member’s bonus and total team effort. If these benefits outweigh the reduction in the success probability, sabotaging the team is rational.