Three central facts describe inter-firm worker mobility in modern labor markets: (1) long-term employment relationships are common; (2) most new jobs end early; and (3) the probability of a job ending declines with tenure. Models based on firm-specific capital provide a parsimonious explanation...

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...

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has...

There are large and important differences between blacks in whites in nearly every facet of life--earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. This chapter contains three themes. First, relative to the 20th century, the significance of discrimination as an explanation for racial...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

Most of the recent literature on the effects of labor market institutions on wages and employment draws on reforms used as natural experiments. This is a significant improvement with respect to the earlier literature which was based solely on cross-country variation in (highly imperfect)...

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...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...