Wage determination under asymmetric information generates ine¢ ciencies due to excess turnover. Layo¤ taxes can improve e¢ ciency. We show that ine¢ cient separations can even be fully removed with …xed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is exponentially distributed. With search frictions, such policies a¤ect the fallback option of labor market participants, hen...

Nurse leaders control the largest part of a hospital labor budget, in some cases the largest part of the overall budget. The effectiveness of overseeing this responsibility can mean the difference between an organization's financial stability and financial turmoil. The nursing department at Northwestern Memorial Hospital took ownership of its financial performance. Over the past 2 years, their ...

This paper utilizes a Norwegian experiment with exogenous wage changes to study teacher’s turnover decisions. Within a completely centralized wage setting system, teachers in schools with a high degree of teacher vacancies in the past got a wage premium of about 10 percent during the period 1993-94 to 2002-03. The empirical strategy exploits that several schools switched status during the empir...

This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of US wartime ship production. Estimates obtained using data constructed from primary sources at the National Archives yield rates of forgetting that are much smaller than previously reported, and may well be zero. The richness of the data make it possible to control for variations in the pro...

O ver the past two decades, workforce mobility has risen significantly and is imposing dramatic but often misunderstood costs on many organizations. According to a 2008 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 30% of workers stay with an employer less than two years, and more than half depart by the five-year mark. The average employee holds as many as eight jobs between the ages of 22 an...

We reconcile trade theory with plant-level export behavior, extending the Ricardian model to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Our model captures qualitatively basic facts about U.S. plants: (i) productivity dispersion, (ii) higher productivity among exporters, (iii) the small fraction who export, (iv) the small fraction earned from exports among export...

Abstract We show that the 2016 Brexit Referendum had multifaceted consequences for corporate America, shaping employment, investment, divestitures, R&D, and savings. The unexpected vote outcome led U.S. firms to cut jobs investment within borders. Using establishment-level data, we document these effects were modulated by reversibility of capital labor. American-based job destruction was pa...