In the last three decades, two questions have been central for the Left. Is there a future for electoral socialism and social democracy? And, is it any longer possible to promote a significant redistribution of income in favour of labour? Political and economic events seem to suggest negative...

In recent literature a relevant problem has been the relationship between career/personal contact networks and different career paths. In addition, the recent advances in social capital theory have shown the way in which networks impact on personal careers. In particular women's careers appear...

We develop a model of relational contracts with moral hazard and asymmetric persistent information about an employee's type. We find that the form of the optimal contract depends on the job characteristics as well as the distribution of employees' talent. Bonus contracts are more likely to be...

We develop a model in which competition in the labor market may produce worker-firm matches that are inferior to those obtained in the absence of competition. This result contrasts with the conventional wisdom that competition among employers allocates scarce talent efficiently. In a model in...

This paper collects an original database of publicly listed companies to determine prevailing gender ratios among board members and executives in Latin America and the Caribbean region (LAC). Women are as under-represented in LAC as in the United States, but much less so in the Caribbean. It is...

We study the optimal management of evolving hierarchies, which abound in real-life phenomena. An initiator invests into finding a subordinate, who will bring revenues to the joint venture and who will invest herself into finding another subordinate, and so on. The higher the individual...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form of a donation received by a...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most-able contestants? To what extent do contestants avoid competition? In this paper, we show, theoretically and empirically, that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Complete sorting exists only...

We analyze the effects on teacher retention and between school mobility of a program that rewards excellence in pedagogical practice in Chile. Teachers apply voluntarily for the award and those who succeed on a set of assessments receive a 6 percent annual wage increase for up to 10 years. We...