The labor market is governed by a panoply of laws, regulating virtually all aspects of the employment relation, including hiring, firing, information exchange, privacy, workplace safety, work hours, minimum wages, and access to courts for redress of violations of rights. Antidiscrimination laws,...

There is growing attention to discrimination in the media and the arts with explicit policies put in place to guarantee salary and representation for specific groups. However, the empirical support for such policies is limited. In this paper we examine book publishing using detailed micro-data...

The economics of beauty is now a burgeoning field of research. Not only the magnitude but also the direction of the beauty effect on labor outcomes is a matter of discussion. In this work, I conduct a quantitative synthesis of 418 estimates of the effect of beauty on worker's productivity, as...

Being beautiful gives a person an advantage in many settings. Attractive people earn more and have an easier time getting hired. People spend large amounts of money on goods and services to enhance their beauty. Is this enhancement worth pursuing? Research suggests that the expected improvement...

In this study, I look at whether individuals treat overweight workers differently from slender workers when deliberating about bonuses and promotions. Using a nationally representative sample of over 1700 subjects, I experimentally vary the performance ratings and the apparent weight of...

Current literature has not examined gender employment issues in Kuwait's banking industry. This is a key knowledge gap as many women are entering the sector and might be facing discriminatory conducts in comparison to their male colleagues. The scarcity of available literature regarding the...

In this paper I construct a search model of a large labor market in which workers are heterogeneous in productivity and (homogeneous) firms post wages and a ranking of workers to direct workers' search. I establish the following results. First, the wage differential is negatively related to...

This paper uses personnel records of employees from an Australian bank to analyse the labour market consequences of career interruptions due to voluntary military service during the Second World War. The records contain the employees’ career position and pay histories, and pre-war outcomes are...

Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard and improve the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the trade-off...