We study worker and firm behavior in an environment where worker effort could depend on co-workers? wages. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers? ?concerns? with coworkers? wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages under quite general conditions. However, firms...

This paper surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: why (and when) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then...

The 'ratchet effect' refers to a situation where a principal uses private information that is revealed by an agent's early actions to the agent's later disadvantage, in a context where binding multi-period contracts are not enforceable. In a simple, context-rich environment, we experimentally...

We experimentally manipulate two aspects of the cognitive environment, cognitive depletion and recent sugar intake, and estimate their effects on individuals' time preferences in a way that allows us to identify the structural parameters of a simple (α,β,δ) intertemporal utility function for...

Can having more education than a job requires reduce one's chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of...

We document how explicit employer requests for applicants of a particular gender enter the recruitment process on a Chinese job board. We find that 95 percent of callbacks to gendered jobs are of the requested gender; worker self-selection ("compliance" with employers' requests) and employer...

When permitted by law, employers sometimes state the preferred age and sex of their employees in job ads. We study this practice using data from one Mexican and three Chinese job boards, showing that it is widely used to request both genders and is especially prevalent in jobs with low skill...

When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of call-backs to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 63 (146) percent. The removal 'worked' in this sense...

We study urban Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board serving private sector employers. We find that employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's...

Are women disproportionately attracted to work environments where cooperation rather than competition is rewarded? This paper reports the results of a real-effort experiment in which participants choose between an individual compensation scheme and a team-based payment scheme. We find that women...