Local labor market shocks are difficult to insure against. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, we document that firms redistribute the employment impacts of local demand shocks across regions through their internal networks of...

We examine a number of personnel practices, laws and regulations that lower the supply of labor in the Japanese economy. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of impediments, those that restrict the movement of labor between firms, and those that discourage women from participating to a greater...

In previous work we showed that a model that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning can explain several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms. In this paper we extend that model in two ways. First, we incorporate schooling into the...

We decompose the real annual full time compensation costs of 1.1 million French workers followed over 12 years into a part that reflects their external opportunity wage and a part that reflects their internal wage rate. Using these components of compensation we investigate the extent to which...

We attempt to explain employment practices in internal labor markets using models that combine job assignment, on-the-job human-capital acquisition, and learning. We show that a framework that integrates these familiar ideas captures a number of recent empirical findings concerning wage and...

Internal labor markets are those where workers are hired into entry level jobs and higher levels are filled from within. Wages are determined internally and may be quite free of market pressure. External labor markets imply that workers move somewhat fluidly between firms and wages are...

This paper investigates whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and to what extent their skill is impacted by the VC firm where they work. We examine a unique dataset that tracks the performance of individual venture capitalists' investments across time and as...

Management risk occurs when uncertainty about future managerial decisions increases a firm's overall risk. This paper argues that management risk is an important yet unexplored determinant of a firm's default risk and the pricing of its debt. CDS spreads, loan spreads and bond yield spreads all...

The trends in executive pay and labor income tax rates since the 1940s suggest a high elasticity of taxable income with respect to tax policy. By contrast, the level and structure of executive compensation have been largely unresponsive to tax incentives since the 1980s. However, the relative...

We study the role of firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in executive compensation. We decompose the variation in executive compensation and find that time invariant firm and especially manager fixed effects explain a majority of the variation in executive pay. We then show that in many...