This paper takes a skeptical look at a leading argument about what is causing the foreclosure crisis and distills some potential lessons for policy. We use an economic model to focus on two key decisions: the borrower's choice to default on a mortgage and the lender's subsequent choice whether...

Firms are often organized into groups. Group membership has been shown empirically to have positive effects, in the form of increased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. This includes an enhanced willingness to engage in altruistic punishment of inefficient defection. Our paper provides...

We report the results of an artefactual field experiment with bicycle messengers in Switzerland and the United States. Messenger work is individualized enough that firms can choose to condition pay on it, but significant externalities in messenger behavior nonetheless give their on-the-job...

In many occupations, workers' labor supply choices are constrained by institutional rules regulating labor time and effort provision. This renders explicit tests of the neoclassical theory of labor supply difficult. Here we present evidence from studies examining labor supply responses in...

Most previous studies on intertemporal labor supply found very small or insignificant substitution effects. It is possible that these results are due to constraints on workers' labor supply choices. We conducted a field experiment in a setting in which workers were free to choose hours worked...

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...