We propose an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets. Under certain conditions, this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort. Moreover, because this scheme employs only ordinal information, it...

Previous empirical work on job search has proposed different approaches to estimating mobility rates assumed in models of search. However, these methods either only work for specific models of wage determination, or else require that we know the initial distribution of productivity for workers...

Economists have recently argued recessions play a useful role in fostering growth. Yet a major source of growth, R&D, is procyclical. This paper argues one reason for procyclical R&D is a dynamic externality inherent in R&D that makes entrepreneurs short-sighted and concentrate their innovation...

Evidence on wage cyclicality shows job changers have more procyclical wages than job stayers. Previous work argued this arises because workers gain greater access to jobs in sectors such as manufacturing that offer high wages. This article argues that workers who switch jobs in booms enter...

This note provides a proper example for the mechanism of strategic complementarities proposed in our paper. ; Original paper in Review of Economic Studies, January 2000, v. 67, no.1, p. 79–90.

This paper extends previous work on the identification of search models in which observed worker productivity is imperfectly observed. In particular, it establishes that these models remain identified even when employment histories are left-censored (i.e. we do not get to follow workers from...