We analyze labor discrimination in Peru, a fast-growing country where much anecdotal evidence suggests the presence of discriminatory practices in everyday life. Using surnames (indigenous/white) as a proxy for race, we sent 4820 fictitious CVs in response to 1205 real job vacancies for...

In a recent paper, Hart and Moore (2008) introduce new behavioral assumptions that can explain long term contracts and important aspects of the employment relation. However, so far there exists no direct evidence that supports these assumptions and, in particular, Hart and Moore’s notion that...

Performance-related pay for teachers is being introduced in many countries, but there is little evaluation to date on the effects of such programs. This paper evaluates a particular incentive experiment. The incentive program is a rank-order tournament among teachers of English, Hebrew, and...

This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication...

This chapter surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: when (and why) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then...

Online platforms often face challenges being both fair (i.e., non-discriminatory) and efficient (i.e., maximizing revenue). Using computer vision algorithms and observational data from a microlending marketplace, we find that choices made by borrowers creating online profiles impact both of...

We partner with a large US payment-processing company to run a 5-year, 10 wave panel survey of incentivized quarterly sales forecasts on over 6,000 firms. We match firm predictions to proprietary revenue data to assess accuracy. We find firms forecast poorly, with issues of inaccuracy,...

This chapter discusses several important topics related to randomization in field experiments. In the field, researchers face constraints in the design they can implement and/or the type of data that can be collected. The chapter looks at such constraints from the point of view of randomization....

In this paper, we argue that important labor market phenomena can be better understood if one takes (i) the inherent incompleteness and relational nature of most employment contracts and (ii) the existence of reference-dependent fairness concerns among a substantial share of the population into...

Online platforms often face challenges being both fair (i.e., non-discriminatory) and efficient (i.e., maximizing revenue). Using computer vision algorithms and observational data from a microlending marketplace, we find that choices made by borrowers creating online profiles impact both of...