Firms' incentives to inform workers about their future viability are analyzed using a two-period signaling model. I find that, if wages can be set after firms learn their viability, they will perfectly signal firms' closure plans. Mandatory-notice laws, if they have any effect at all, reduce worker utility and raise profits because they obviate the need for "permanent" firms to signal via higher wages. If a noncontingent wage must be set before any private information arrives, pooling occurs in the absence of legislation, and mandatory-notice laws can be Pareto improving.

We use newly available data from the Ontario Ministry of Labour to estimate the effects of advance notification of permanent layoff on unemployment durations. While notice is strongly negatively correlated with unemployment in the raw data, most of this effect disappears when we control for personal characteristics and when we correct for endogeneity of notice by using only its cross-firm variation to identify its effects. Overall, while short notice intervals can have a substantial effect on the probability of experiencing a short unemployment spell, we find that even very long notice intervals have little impact on long-term unemployment.

Unions are introduced into a general equilibrium model of firm formation. I find, under reasonable conditions, that large firms are more likely to be unionized, and that unionized firms are more productive and "better managed" than nonunion firms of the same size. As well, unions reduce economic efficiency by distorting the "occupation choice" decision between managing a firm and working in one. Perhaps surprisingly, this distortion persists even when individual union contracts set both wages and employment in a fully efficient manner but can disappear when the mechanism that allocates property rights to union jobs is changed in certain ways.

Existing models of incentive compatibility in life-cycle employment contracts arrive at different predictions partly because of the different kinds of "contract-breaking" behavior allowed in them. This paper sets out and classifies the full range of such behaviors, argues that no model has yet incorporated all of them, and examines the consequences of doing so in the context of Lazear's well-known model. In the extended model, wages cannot rise faster than marginal products throughout the entire contract, and the set of feasible contracts can often be empty, even when both parties can commit to terminate the contract whenever it is broken by the other party.

Compared to older women, young female job seekers are more than three times as likely to report that their ability to find a good new job is compromised by their gender. This phenomenon cannot be statistically attributed to observed personal or job characteristics, or to any “objective” measure of discrimination. Further, women's reports of gender‐induced advantage, and men's reports of gender‐induced harm, are also more prevalent among the young. A possible interpretation of all these patterns is that young people are more likely to interpret a given departure from gender‐neutral treatment as causally affected by their gender.

When union‐firm pairs bargain sequentially, and when unobserved components of firms' abilities to pay are subject to correlated shocks, unions that bargain later in a sequence can acquire valuable information by observing previous bargaining outcomes in their industry. We derive the implications of this kind of learning in an asymmetric information model of wage negotiations and argue that the most robust implication is a lower incidence of strikes among “followers” than “leaders” in wage negotiations. Considerable empirical support for this implication is found in a long panel of Canadian contract negotiations.

We use a vignette-based survey experiment to elicit respondents’ assessments of the fairness of race-based hiring decisions and compare these assessments with the predictions of four preregistered ethical frameworks. While conservative respondents are much more accepting of discriminatory actions than others, respondents of all political leanings rate the relative fairness of different actions in a very similar way. A two-group framework in which one group (mostly self-described conservatives) values employers’ decision rights, the other has utilitarian concerns, and both groups use the same race-blind rules to assign relative fairness levels to actions explains our data well.

We estimate turnover costs in small retail sales teams using daily sales data and an advance notice requirement to address endogeneity concerns. In addition to short-staffing and onboarding costs, we identify two less familiar sources of turnover costs: incumbent workers’ recruitment activities and reductions in team morale after a departure is announced. Our estimates of total turnover costs are relatively modest, however: 10% higher turnover is about as costly as a 0.6% wage increase. We attribute these low costs to a set of complementary personnel policies that ensure that only 25% of departures result in a short-staffing spell.

According to U.S. Census and Current Population Survey (CPS) data, employed U.S. men are more likely to work more than 48 hours per week today than 25 years ago. Using 1979–2006 CPS data, we show that this increase was greatest in the 1980s, among highly educated, highly paid, and older men, and among workers paid on a salaried basis. We examine some possible explanations for these changes, including composition effects. Among salaried men, increases in long work hours were greatest in detailed occupations and industries with larger increases in residual wage inequality and slowly growing real compensation at “standard” (40) hours.

We study worker behavior in an efficiency‐wage environment in which coworkers’ wages can influence a worker’s effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ responsiveness to coworkers’ wages should lead profit‐maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments, by contrast, show that while workers’ effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages, effort is not affected by coworkers’ wages. This casts doubt on the notion that workers’ concerns with equity might explain pay policies such as wage compression or wage secrecy.