The coronavirus crisis has led to the unemployment of millions of workers and exposed a labor market that is full of poor-quality jobs. Policymakers intuitively resort to upgrading worker skills as a workforce response to the pandemic; however, the problem isn't with retraining. The nation's...

This study examines the effect of noncompete enforceability on training and wages. An increase from non-enforcement to mean enforceability is associated with a 14% increase in training, which tends to be firm-sponsored and designed to upgrade or teach new skills. In contrast to theoretical...

In this paper we investigate wage determination among professional football players ranked in the Italian A and B series. Since football is a highly labor intensive activity, both scale economies and scarcity of the most talented players emerge as the main determinants of the high earnings...

Drawing on human capital theory, strategy scholars have emphasized firm-specific human capital as a source of sustained competitive advantage. In this study, we begin to unpack the micro-foundations of firm-specific human capital by theoretically and empirically exploring when employees perceive...

This paper analyzes the job assignment problem faced by a firm when workers' skills are distributed along several dimensions and jobs require different skills to varying extent. I derive optimal assignment rules with and without slot constraints, and show that under certain circumstances workers...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....