When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, a school has incentives to inflate grades to help its mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for its good students. We construct a signaling model where...

When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, schools have an incentive to inflate grades to help mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for good students. We construct a signaling model where grades are...

The Employees Retraining Programme in Hong Kong was promoted as the solution to structural unemployment resulting from rapid transformation of the economy. However, our study of the labour market performance of a group of trainees shows no evidence of any positive programme effect, more than...

In a dynamic model of sports competition, if spectators care only about contestants' efforts, incentive schemes depending linearly on the final score difference dominate rank order schemes based only on who wins. If spectators also care about suspense, defined as valuing more contestants'...

In Chan (1996), I suggest that a contest between internal and external candidates for a position within a firm is generally biased in favor of the former to maintain work incentive for existing workers. This implies that a successful external candidate tends to be superior in ability relative to...

In a dynamic model of sports competition, we show that when spectators care only about the level of effort exerted by contestants, rewarding schemes that depend linearly on the final score difference provide more efficient incentives for efforts than schemes based only on who wins and loses....

This article presents a model of labor market adjustments as a sequential process of reallocation among various market and nonmarket sectors. Training costs introduce friction into the process, while fixed costs of working limit work sharing, resulting in unemployment. Adjustments in sectoral...

This article analyzes the choice between internal promotion and external recruitment within the framework of an economic contest. Opening up the competition for a position to external candidates reduces the chance of promotion for existing workers and, therefore, their incentive to work....