As of 2019, salary history bans have been enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws...

Young firms disproportionately employ and hire young workers. On average, young employees in young firms earn higher wages than young employees in older firms. Young employees disproportionately join young firms with greater innovation potential and that exhibit higher growth, conditional on...

Why do young firms pay less? Previous studies have argued that employees willingly accept lower wages at new firms in response to offsetting benefits. A second literature argues that lower wages at new firms are driven by the selection of lower quality workers into new firms, firms which are...

Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find within-firm variation accounts for a dramatically lower percentage of total variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits than in wages. We...

Nonwage benefits have become increasingly important and now represent 30% of total compensation (BLS, 2021). Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find dramatically lower within-firm variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher...