In three experiments, we examine how an employer reputation system disciplines an online labor market (Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which employers may decline to pay workers while keeping their work product. These three experiments test the value of the employer reputation system for workers,...

The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager. In these cases, do firms promote the best potential manager or the best worker in her current job? Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 214 firms, we find evidence consistent with the “Peter Principle,” which...

The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager. In these cases, do firms promote the best potential manager or the best worker in her current job? Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 131 firms, we find evidence consistent with the Peter Principle, which proposes...

I present a theory of couples' job search whereby women sort into lower-paying geographically-dispersed occupations due to expectations of future spouses' geographically-clustered occupations and (thereby) inability to relocate for work. Results confirm men segregate into...

The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager. In these cases, do firms promote the best potential manager or the best worker in her current job? Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 214 firms, we find evidence consistent with the "Peter Principle," which...

This paper examines whether plantwide incentives for quality actually have incentive effects, a puzzle because high level incentives are common but potentially vulnerable to freeriding and other obstacles. We exploit a natural experiment embedded in a common but economically peculiar feature of...

Shared bonus pools, in which a worker’s bonus depends both on a worker’s share of the pool (which serves as the incentive) and on the size of the pool (which is largely outside of the worker’s control), are a common method for distributing bonus pay. Using variation in the size of the...