This paper studies peer effects on student achievement among first graders randomly assigned to classrooms in Tennessee's Project STAR. The analysis uses previously unexploited pre-assignment achievement measures available for 60 percent of students. Data are not missing at random, making...

In this paper we seek to understand how firms learn about what adjustments they need to make in their organization structure at the workplace level. We define four organizational systems: traditional (the simplest system), high-performance (the most complex system), decision-making oriented, and...

What do trust and the economy have to do with each other? In a world of perfect and symmetric information, where all related economic actions are simultaneous and occur in one place, the economy runs in the familiar fashion of the perfectly competitive market. In such a world, trust among...

This paper explores the relationship between the presence of employee involvement workplace practices and wage dispersion within firms. Using the representative sample of U.S. establishments from the National Employer Survey conducted in 1994 and 1997, the paper explores the links between...

The asumption that behavior is independent of the identity of those who participate in an economic interaction is fundamental to economists’ understanding of how markets operate, how firms work internally, how nations trade with each other, and much else. In this paper, we show that the...

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics database to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within industry changes in wage inequality between 1992 and 2003. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting...

The widespread movement from defined benefit (DB) plans to defined contribution (DC) plans over the past few decades has transferred much of the retirement savings risk from the institution to the individual, particularly in the private sector. This study uses the Retirement Confidence Survey of...

The paper compares behavior in economic dictator game experiments played with actual money (amounts given by "dictator" subjects) with behavior in hypothetical dictator game experiments where subjects indicate what they would give, although no money is actually exchanged. The average amounts...

The task environment, characterized by the degree of complexity, variability, and routine of workers’ tasks, creates varying degrees of asymmetric information between workers and their supervisors, as well as poses varying degrees of difficulty for supervisors and workers in making correct...

While past research on health care workers has found that shift work can lead to negative physiological and psychological consequences, few studies have assessed the extent to which it increases the risk of specific work-related injuries, nor quantified and compared associated types, severity,...