This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

Economic models of contract typically assume that courts enforce obligations based on verifiable events (corresponding to the legal rule of specific performance). As a matter of law, this is not the case. This leaves open the question of optimal contract design given the available remedies used...

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions -- dismissal barriers, and bonus pay -- affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and...

From 1986 through 1997 the entry-level market for American gastroenterologists was organized by a centralized clearinghouse. Before, and since, it has been conducted via a decentralized market in which appointment dates have unraveled to well over a year before the start of employment. The...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the intrinsic preferences of state appellate court judges. We construct a panel data set using published decisions from state supreme court cases merged with institutional and biographical information on all (1,700) state supreme court...

We document that an increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonuses, commissions, or piece-rates. We find that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed (by the econometrician) and unobserved...

Recent research documents that while men are eager to compete, women often shy away from competitive environments. A consequence is that few women enter and win competitions. Using experimental methods we examine how affirmative action affects competitive entry. We find that when women are...

We examine whether women and men of the same ability differ in their decisions to seek challenges. In the laboratory, we create an environment in which we can measure a participants performance level (high or low), where a high performance level participant has on average higher earnings from...