This paper investigates the effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on CEO compensation, using panel data constructed for the S&P 1500 firms on CEO compensation, financial returns, and reported accounting income. Empirically SOX (i) changes the relationship between a firm’s abnormal returns and CEO compensation, (ii) changes the underlying distribution of abnormal returns, and (iii) significant...

From Team Spirit to Jealousy: The Pitfalls of Too Much Transparency Free riding in team production arises because individual effort is not perfectly observable. It seems natural to suppose that greater transparency would enhance incentives. Therefore, it is puzzling that team production often lacks transparency about individual contributions despite negligible costs for providing such informati...

Employment contracts are often incomplete, leaving many responsibilities subject to workers’ discretion. High work morale is therefore essential for sustaining voluntary cooperation and high productivity in firms. We conducted a field experiment to test whether workers reciprocate wage cuts and raises with low or high work productivity. Wage cuts had a detrimental and persistent impact on produ...

The Relationship Between Economic Preferences and Psychological Personality Measures Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them. In this review we first analyze the extent to which economic preferences and psychological concepts of personality – such as the Big Five and locus of control – are...

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...

The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-b...

Sri Lanka’s Termination of Employment of Workmen Act (TEWA) requires that firms with 15 or more workers justify layoffs and provide generous severance pay to displaced workers, with smaller firms being exempted. Although formally subject to TEWA, firms in Export Promotion Zones (EPZs) do not face the same constraints as nonEPZ firms due to size incentives and lax labor law enforcement in that s...

This article examines the effects of the federal Prison Industry Enhancement Certificate Program (PIE) on unemployment duration, length of employment, and earnings of inmates released between 1996 and 2001 across 5 states. This is the first nationally representative dataset of PIE and this is the first comprehensive study to analyze the effect of this program on labor market outcomes of the inm...

We develop a model of partnership and marriage based upon individual abilities and match-specific returns. A theoretical result is that marriage and same-sex partnership positively select more able individuals, while the effect of unmarried heterosexual partnership is ambiguous. We conduct empirical analysis with a unique new data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of ...