Women have, on average, been less well-paid than men throughout history. Prior to 1900, most economic historians see the gender wage gap as a reflection of men's greater strength and correspondingly higher productivity. This paper investigates the gender wage gap in cigar making around 1900....

We study the role of firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in executive compensation. We decompose the variation in executive compensation and find that time invariant firm and especially manager fixed effects explain a majority of the variation in executive pay. We then show that in many...

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the "last" chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor...

The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of...

This study uses panel data describing about 6,500 employees in a large international company to study the incentive effects of performance related pay. The company uses two performance related remuneration mechanisms. One is an individual "surprise" bonus payment. The other is a more structured...

We study the impact of and reward to middle management ability using data from 245 stores of a nationwide retailer. The company scores six broad areas of management practice, the most important of which turns out to be "commercial awareness", where able managers raise labour productivity by 17%...

This paper studies the impact of incentives on worker self-selection in a controlled laboratory experiment. In a first step we elicit subjects’ productivity levels. Subjects then face the choice between a fixed or a variable payment scheme. Depending on the treatment, the variable payment is...

This paper uses a combination of workplace and matched-employee workplace data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions and firm-provided training (incidence, intensity/coverage, and duration) on establishment performance. The performance effects...

A key tenet of the theory of human capital is that investment in skills results in higher productivity. The previous literature has estimated the degree of investment in human capital for individuals by looking at individual wage growth as a proxy for productivity growth. In this paper, we have...

The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of...