In recent years, the cost to merchants of accepting credit cards has risen dramatically without a corresponding increase in the benefits. This trend has sparked a wide-ranging struggle between merchants and banks, as merchants have begun to seek methods for limiting payment costs. The conflict...

Merchants and banks are currently engaged in a wide-ranging struggle for control over payment systems. The conflict is playing itself out in business practices, in banking regulation, in corporate governance, in corporate restructuring, in securities offerings, and in the biggest antitrust...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

Occupational licensing is among the fastest-growing labor market institutions in the U.S. economy. One of the key features of occupational licensing is that the law determines who gets to do the work. In those cases where universally licensed occupations are both complements to and substitutes...

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. In order to measure the net effect of competition we use two different identification strategies. The first exploits cross sectoral variation in...

This paper studies the effect of deregulation and increased product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. We use a panel of US executives in the nineties and exploit the deregulation episodes in the banking and financial sectors as quasi-natural...

Since the 1980s, the labour demand has shifted toward more educated workers in the US. The most common explanation is that the productivity of skilled workers has risen relative to the unskilled, but it is not easy to explain why the aggregate labour productivity was stagnant during the 1980s....

Tanulmányunk az ágazatok közötti kereseti különbségek mértékét, keletkezésük okait elemzi Magyarországon a kilencvenes évek végén. Az első részben áttekintjük az ágazatközi bérkülönbségekre vonatkozó legfontosabb elméleti megfontolásokat, bemutatjuk a vizsgálatukra...

Tanulmányunk az ágazatok közötti kereseti különbségek mértékét, keletkezésük okait elemzi Magyarországon, a kilencvenes évek végén. Az első részben - mely a Közgazdasági Szemle 2003. novemberi számában jelent meg - áttekintettük az ágazatközi bérkülönbségekre...

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives and in particular its impact on the sensitivity of pay to performance. To measure the effect of competition we use two different identification strategies on a panel of...