We survey the Personnel Economics literature, focusing on how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees. This literature has been very successful in generating models and empirical work about incentive systems. Some of the...

Many firms issue stock options to all employees. We consider three potential economic justifications for this practice: providing incentives to employees, inducing employees to sort, and helping firms retain employees. We gather data on firms' stock option grants to middle managers from three...

We investigate the hypothesis that complementarities across co-workers (which may arise from matching or investments in specific skills) affect the value of employment relationships between senior executives and firms. We analyze the changes in the composition of top management teams when a key...

Using a detailed data set of employee stock option grants, we compare observed stock-option-based pay plans to hypothetical cash-only or restricted-stock-based plans. We make a variety of assumptions regarding the possible benefits of options relative to cash or stock, and then use observed...

Competition for seats in elite U.S. graduate school programs has intensified dramatically over the past 40 years. In this paper, we study the market for young attorneys to illuminate the role that elite graduate programs play in human capital development. We find that attorneys who graduate from...

We survey the Personnel Economics literature, focusing on how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees. This literature has been very successful in generating models and empirical work about incentive systems. Some of the...

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 (CRA91) was enacted after a rancorous debate about whether it was a "quota" hiring bill or a necessary means of opening labor markets. We analyze the effects of CRA91 on the composition of firms' workforces. We consider employer behavior when firms vary in their...

We analyze changes in the composition of top management teams when a key member of the team (the CEO) departs. We find that the probability of non-CEO top manager turnover increases markedly around times of CEO turnover. Further, the magnitude of this increase depends on the relations between...

Many firms issue stock options to all employees. We consider three potential economic justifications for this practice: providing incentives to employees, inducing employees to sort, and helping firms retain employees. We gather data on firms' stock option grant to middle managers from three...

We estimate the costs of broad-based stock option programs relative to cash compensation and restricted stock grants. Using detailed data on stock-option grants to middle managers, we first compute the cost of option grants under the assumption that grants are driven solely by the difference...