Wages or Fringes? Some Evidence on Trade-offs and Sorting The two key predictions of hedonic wage theory are that there is a trade-off between wages and nonmonetary rewards and that the latter can be used as a sorting device by firms to attract and retain the kind of employees they desire. Empirical analysis of these topics are scarce as they require detailed data on all monetary as well as non...

We develop a model to analyze the implications of "ring costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that countries with a rigid labor market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at a late stage of their product life cycle. Consequently, their researchers tend to specialize in &secondary innovation' which improves existing products, rather than &primary...

Despite a strong interest in entrepreneurship, economists have devoted little attention to the role of health insurance availability. I investigate the impact of a unique policy experiment—New Jersey’s Individual Health Coverage Plan—on self-employment. Implemented in August 1993, the IHCP included an extensive set of reforms that loosened the historical connection between traditional employmen...

SUMMARY The reconciliation of audit evidence to the subject matter is a key and recurring procedure. Before reconciling information, data needs be extracted from matter, which often in Portable Document Format (PDF). Reconciliations are task for every new version matter. Large firms typically “offshore” simple repetitive tasks such as reconciliations shared service centers. Offshoring however c...

Economic debates over minimum wage policy are typically premised on the assumption that raising a binding wage floor must reduce long-run employment if the affected markets are competitive and complete. It is shown here to the contrary that employment effects of raising the minimum are indeterminate if competitive employers incur person-specific labor costs, which vary with the number of employ...

Social Incentives Matter: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and nonprofit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives to financial incentives using an online real effort experiment. We find that soci...

The Benefits of Being Economics Professor A (and not Z) Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more often than Professor Z, will have published mo...

Health Insurance Benefit Mandates and the Firm-Size Distribution By 2010, the average US state had passed 37 health insurance benefit mandates (laws requiring health insurance plans to cover certain additional services). Previous work has shown that these mandates likely increase health insurance premiums, which in turn could make it more costly for firms to compensate employees. Using 1996–201...

We compare two alternative ways of measuring workers’ marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for four non-standard working arrangements: flexitime, part-time, night work, and rotating shifts. The first method is based on job-to-job transitions within a job search framework, while the second is based on estimating the determinants of subjective well-being. Using BHPS panel data from 1991-2008, we rel...