External recruitment is often believed to be harmful in that it trades off the need for outside talents with the incentives of inside workers. This article shows that, even from an incentive viewpoint, external recruitment has its powerful function. Specifically, if promotion is based on relative performance, then negative activities (sabotages) are a valuable instrument for competition. This results in inefficiency of the firm. External recruitment, by reducing the marginal return of negative effort relative to that of productive effort, restores the incentives in productive activity. Even without sabotage concern, external recruitment can avoid shirking equilibrium or prevent workers’ collusion.

We use the medical specialties of physician-patients with advanced cancer to study the role of knowledge versus networks in treatment choices and patient survival by matching comparable patients with doctors and admission periods to control unobserved doctor quality. Physician-patients are less likely to have surgery, radiation, or checkups and more likely to receive targeted therapy, spend more on drugs, enjoy a higher survival rate, and spend less on coinsurance than nonphysician-patients. Knowledge mechanisms play a crucial role because the network effect explains some, but not all, patterns. For less informed physician-patients, possessing a network is equivalent to reducing medical knowledge.

This article proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated. We derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern of a family. We show that migration can take place even when migrants earn less abroad and, surprisingly, when earnings in the foreign country are riskier for every member of the family. Moreover, it may well be an optimal arrangement to have only dependents migrate, thus rationalizing the recent dependent‐oriented migration flows from places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. We provide some evidence in support of our theory.

This paper examines real wage measures that include leisure and nonlabor income in consumption decisions with respect to the advantages and disadvantages of partial versus complete welfare orderings and of utility-based versus utility-free wage indices. In addition, we argue that the usefulness of a real wage measure beyond welfare comparison has been ignored. To test the robustness of utility-based indices, these real wage measures are calculated for two different utility-function specifications, the indirect addilog system and the linear expenditure system. Further comparisons are made against index bounds that are independent of the functional form for preferences.

The negative effect of quits on the willingness of firms to provide on‐the‐job training is well documented in the theoretical literature. Here we explore the strength of this effect by solving a firm’s dynamic optimization problem where there is uncertainty about future productivity and nonzero firing costs. We find that the degree to which quit rates affect hiring depends on the ratio of firing to hiring costs. As this ratio rises, the negative effect of quits becomes less important, eventually reversing itself. We also describe how quit rates affect the firing decision. We highlight some testable implications of our analysis.