The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often place employees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second, demotions are extremely rare. Why do organizations not correct 'wrong' promotion decision? This paper...

Host countries have implemented permanent and guest-worker (GW) immigration programs in recent decades, while the temporary movement of service providers under Mode IV of the GATS is one of the issues being negotiated at the Doha Round of the WTO. Though decisions on what programs to adopt have...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can be undone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content to this proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wage profile in a quasi-experimental...

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop searching is made by a committee. We show that a symmetric stationary equilibrium exists and is unique given that the distribution of rewards is log concave. Committee members set a lower acceptance threshold than do...

This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce situations, and on family decisions. We assume three generations within the family. We develop a sequential game that, in a first stage, determines the optimum level of the transfer...

This note provides a useful property of the Allen-Uzawa partials for the translog cost function. It also suggests how the main results extend to any functional form with certain properties. The curvature of the Allen-Uzawa matrix is the same as the curvature of the Hessian matrix. Intuitively...

We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high-skilled and low-skilled...

Many countries have legislation which make it costly for firms to dismiss or retrench workers. In the case of India, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, requires firms that employ 50 or more workers to pay a compensation to any worker who is to be retrenched. This paper builds a theoretical model...

Social scientists study two kinds of inequality: inequality between persons (as in income inequality) and inequality between subgroups (as in racial inequality). This paper analyzes the mathematical connections between the two kinds of inequality. The paper proceeds by exploring a set of...