Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

Labor turnover creates longer term career concerns incentives that motivate employees in addition to the short term monetary incentives provided by the current employer. We analyze how these incentives interact and derive implications for the design of incentive contracts and organizational...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

Our research addresses fundamental long - standing concerns in the compensating wage differentials literature and its public policy implications: the econometric properties of estimates of the value of statistical life (VSL) and the wide range of such estimates from about $0.5 million to about...

We introduce a new task-based framework to describe production. It focuses on the fact that certain tasks are too complex for many workers to perform. In such an environment, the relationship between wages of workers may significantly differ from their relative productivities. The labor market...

The main function of hierarchies is to coordinate activities within an organisation, but a hierarchical structure also provides work incentives, by offering the prospect of hierarchical mobility. An alternative way for organisations to motivate workers is through job design. In organisations...

This paper shows that top management structures in large US firms radically changed since the mid-1980s. While the number of managers reporting directly to the CEO doubled, the growth was driven primarily by functional managers rather than general managers. Using panel data on senior management...