For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated...

We consider multi-agent multi-firm contracting when agents benchmark their wages to a weighted average of their peers, where weights may vary within and across firms. Despite common shocks, compensation benchmarking can undo performance benchmarking, so that wages load positively rather than...

We present a model of public procurement in which both contractual flexibility and political tolerance for contractual deviations determine renegotiations. In the model, contractual flexibility allows for adaptation without formal renegotiation while political tolerance for deviations decreases...

India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) of 1947 requires firm with more than 100 workers to pay large costs if they shrink their employment. Since the early 2000s, large Indian manufacturing firms have increasingly relied on contract workers who are not subject to the IDA. By 2015, contract...

Worker mobility across firms can enhance innovation by spreading knowledge, but such mobility may also hinder innovation by making firms reluctant to invest in R&D. A common way that firms limit workers' mobility is with noncompete agreements (NCAs). We examine how the legal enforceability of...

We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd et al. (1999) that allows firms to differ both in the wages they offer new hires and the wages required to poach their employees. Expected hiring wages are modeled as the sum of a worker fixed effect, a...

We conduct the first field experiment of a performance-contingent microfinance contract. A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Working with the firm in Kenya, we compare asset financing under a traditional debt...

The paper examines changes in wage and hour labor regulation between 1898 and 1938. Many see the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision striking down hours limits for men as the beginning of 30 years in which labor regulation was stymied by the doctrine of "freedom of contract." That issue played a...

Performance pay in general amounts to only a small fraction of total pay. In this paper, we show that performance pay is nevertheless important for the level and dynamics of wages over the life cycle because of the incentives it indirectly provides for human capital acquisition and because of...

We conduct an interactive online experiment framed as an employment contract between employer and worker. Subjects from the US, India, and Africa are matched in pairs within and, in some cases, across countries. Employers make a one-period offer to a worker who can either decline or choose a...