In many professional service firms, new associates work long hours while competing in up-or-out promotion contests. Our model explores why these firms require young professionals to take on heavy workloads while simultaneously facing significant risks of dismissal. We argue that the productivity...

Many attempts to measure the wage effects of current labor market discrimination against minorities include controls for worker productivity that (1) could themselves be affected by market discrimination and (2) are very imprecise measures of worker skill. The resulting estimates of residual...

Taken as a whole, the literature on black-white wage inequality suggests that racial gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women, and further that one can accurately assess black-white gaps in potential wages among women without accounting for black-white differences in patterns...

More than two decades ago, Smith and Welch (1989) used the 1940 through 1980 census files to document important relative black progress. However, recent data indicate that this progress did not continue, at least among men. The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades...

The model of job search involves both employer matches and career matches and incorporates an asymmetry in the search technology. Workers may change employers without changing careers, but cannot search over possible lines of work while working for one employer. The optimal policy implies a...

We analyze an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students....

All data sources indicate that black-white skill gaps diminished over most of the 20th century, but black-white skill gaps as measured by test scores among youth and educational attainment among young adults have remained constant or increased in absolute value since the late 1980s. I examine...

A significant literature in demography and demographic history documents clear relationships between the supply of men with stable earnings and marriage rates among women. Wilson (1987) reasons that because single motherhood is an alternative to traditional marriage, circumstances that impede...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the effect of Catholic secondary schooling on high-school graduation rates and also examines Catholic schooling's effect on college graduation rates and future wages. The paper uses data from...

Many test-based accountability systems, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), place great weight on the numbers of students who score at or above specified proficiency levels in various subjects. Accountability systems based on these metrics often provide incentives for teachers...