It has long been recognized that an improved standard of living results from advances in technology, not from the accumulation of capital. It has also become clear that what truly separates developed from less-developed countries is not just a gap in resources or output but a gap in knowledge. In fact, the pace at which developing countries grow is largely a function of the pace at which they close that gap.
This paper examines how organizations use employee networks to contend with job seekers' search behavior. According to prior research, in markets where job seekers engage in nonsequential job search, organizations respond with tactics such as exploding offers and recruiting candidates earlier. In this paper, I posit that organizations have a social structural response. I argue that in an attempt to avoid problems related to candidates' job search, organizations are more likely to provide job offers to candidates with friends in the hiring organization than to those without friends.
The health effects of menstruation are a controversial explanation for gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings. This paper provides the first evidence on this issue using data that combines labor market outcomes with information on health. We find that menstrual problems could account for some of the gender gap in illness-related absences, but menstrual problems are associated with other negative health conditions, suggesting our estimates may overstate causal effects. Nevertheless, menstrual problems explain very little of the gender gap in earnings.
We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, contingent work, outsourcing, and performance pay as well as the success of social identity movements in shaping employment benefits.
Considerable theory regarding how employers learn about worker productivity remains untested. Examining the provision of objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals, we establish several facts supporting a simple Bayesian learning model with imperfect information. First, the correlation between performance estimates and prior beliefs rises with more precise objective estimates and more precise subjective priors. Second, new information exerts greater influence on posterior beliefs when it is more precise and when priors are less precise.
Significant work time in the U.S. is lost each year due to worker absence, but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification. In this paper, we use uniquely detailed data on the timing, duration, and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence.
Ichino and Moretti (2009) find that menstruation may contribute to gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings, based on evidence that absences of young female Italian bank employees follow a 28-day cycle. We find this evidence is not robust to the correction of coding errors or small changes in specification, and we find no evidence of increased female absenteeism on 28-day cycles in data on school teachers.
Standard principal-agent models commonly invoked to explain executive pay practices do not account for the involvement of third-party intermediaries in the CEO labor market. This paper investigates the influence of one such intermediary — talent agents who seek out prospective employers and negotiate pay packages on behalf of CEOs. Jensen, Murphy and Wruck (2004) characterize the hiring of such agents as an obvious example of rent extraction by incoming CEOs.
This paper analyzes longitudinal state-level data during the period 1995–2004 to investigate whether use of newer prescription drugs has reduced the ratio of the number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits to the working-age population (the “DI recipiency rate”).