I study age discrimination in hiring, exploiting a difference between age-revealed and partially age-blind hiring procedures. Under the first hiring procedure, age is revealed simultaneously with other applicant information and job offer rates are much lower for older than for younger job...

Employee referral programs (ERPs) are randomly introduced in a grocery chain. Larger referral bonuses increase referrals and decrease referral quality, though the increase in referrals from having an ERP is modest. However, the overall effect of having an ERP is substantial, reducing attrition...

This paper views hiring as a contextual bandit problem: to find the best workers over time, firms must balance "exploitation" (selecting from groups with proven track records) with "exploration" (selecting from under-represented groups to learn about quality). Yet modern hiring algorithms, based...

We survey the Personnel Economics literature, focusing on how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees. This literature has been very successful in generating models and empirical work about incentive systems. Some of the...

Using data from the Employment Opportunity Pilot Project, we examine the relationship between the starting wage paid to the worker filling a vacancy, the number of applications attracted by the vacancy, the number of candidates interviewed for the vacancy, and the duration of the vacancy. We...

We approach the design of anti-discriminatory labor market regulation as a delegation problem. A private firm (the agent) is repeatedly faced with the opportunity of hiring one among several applicants to fill its vacancies. The firm is biased against applicants from some demographic group, and...

One of the productive activities engaging the work force is reorganizing. When factors of production are better matched, productivity is higher. The probabilistic matching model of Diamond, Mortensen, and others provides a way to make the idea of reorganization precise. Because the flow of...