This article studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

This article provides one of the first rigorous estimations of the labor-market returns to community college certificates and diplomas, as well as estimations of the returns to the more commonly studied associate’s degrees. Using administrative data from Kentucky, we estimate panel-data models...

We use new matched employer-employee data to estimate the contributions of sex segregation and wage differences by sex within occupation, industry, establishment, and occupation-establishment cells to the overall sex gap in wages. In contrast to earlier data used to study this question, our data...

Using establishment-level data, we shed light on the sources of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over recent decades. Our findings are: (1) the between-plant component of wage dispersion is an important and growing part of total wage...

Studies examining welfare-to-work program effectiveness present mixed and sometimes discrepant findings, partly due to research design, data, and methodological limitations. Using administrative data on Missouri and North Carolina welfare recipients, we substantially improve on past estimation...

The Appalachian region has experienced persistently higher poverty and lower earnings than the rest of the United States. We examine whether skill differentials or differences in the returns to those skills lie at the root of the Appalachian wage gap. Using census data, we decompose the...