This paper studies career concerns -- concerns about the effects of current performance on future compensation -- and describes how optimal incentive contracts are affected when career concerns are taken into account. Career concerns arise frequently: they occur whenever the market uses a...

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

Time preference is a key determinant of occupational choice and investments in human capital. Since careers are characterized by different wage growth prospects, individual discount rates play an important role in the relative valuation of jobs or occupations. We predict that individuals with...

This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time. We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level. In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper...

This study uses Current Population Survey cohort data and the National Longitudinal Survey for men aged 14-24 in 1966 to examine the earnings growth of college graduates relative to high school graduates during the 1970s depressed market for graduates. The principal finding is that the...

The quantitative effects and even the existence of "human capital depreciation" phenomena has been a subject of controversy in the recent literature. Prior work, however, was largely cross-sectional and theiotgitudina1 dimension, if any, was retrospective. Using longitudinal panel data (on...