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on Human Capital and Human Resource Management |
| By: | Tho Pham; Daniel Schaefer; Carl Singleton |
| Abstract: | National payroll data reveal that men are paid more than women when they enter firms in Great Britain. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap – the wage gap that would eventually prevail under constant employment levels. We find that a significant amount of this hiring wage gap is not explained by men and women working in different firms and occupations. Even when a firm hires men and women into the same specific occupation at roughly the same time, and accounting for previous work experience, there remains an unexplained hiring wage gap within jobs that favours men by 2.4 log points. These findings suggest that gender pay gap reporting laws that focus exclusively on the overall gaps within employers miss an important margin. |
| Keywords: | Gender segregation, Occupation-specific wages, Employer-employee data |
| JEL: | J16 J31 J70 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-01 |
| By: | Erik Sarrazin (Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany) |
| Abstract: | Creativity and teamwork are essential in today’s rapidly evolving labor market, yet little is known about how incentives shape creative group processes across multiple creativity dimensions, specifically quantity, quality, and originality. I introduce a novel verbal creative coordination task to incentivize and objectively measure these dimensions of creativity and to generate insights into the full creative group process. Thereby, this paper investigates how idea generation, evaluation, and selection can be effectively incentivized in Groups and which incentive scheme maximizes innovation—ideas that are both high in Quality and originality. In a laboratory experiment with 640 participants, groups are randomly assigned to a control or one of three group-level relative performance pay treatments targeting either quantity, quality, or originality. Results show that quantity incentives lead to broader exploration, increasing both the number and average originality of ideas, and outperform all other treatments on the combined indicator of innovative ideas. Quality incentives improve idea quality, while originality incentives fail to boost originality. Incentives mainly operate through higher individual effort rather than group dynamics. Across all conditions, the evaluation and selection phases act as a bottleneck, with highly original ideas systematically discarded. These findings highlight that maximizing creative Output requires incentives that promote exploration and structures that preserve original ideas. |
| Keywords: | creativity, innovation, incentives, teamwork, laboratory experiment |
| JEL: | O31 M52 C92 D02 |
| Date: | 2026–01–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jgu:wpaper:2601 |
| By: | Kory Kroft; Isaac Norwich; Matthew J. Notowidigdo; Stephen Tino |
| Abstract: | Many temporary foreign worker programs issue “closed” visas that effectively tie workers to a single employer, restricting worker mobility and weakening bargaining power. We study the labor market return to temporary foreign workers (TFWs) gaining permanent residency (PR), which loosens this mobility restriction. Using administrative data linking matched employer-employee data in Canada to temporary and permanent visa records from 2004–2014 along with an event-study design, we find that gaining PR leads to a sharp, immediate, and persistent increase in the job switching rate of 21.7 percentage points and an increase in earnings of 5.7 percent three years after PR. Workers also sort into high-wage firms after gaining PR, and the increase in the firm pay premium is roughly 56 percent of the total earnings gain. We find larger earnings gains for job switchers across industries, low-skilled workers, and workers from low-income countries. To guide and interpret our reduced-form results, we develop a search-and-matching model featuring heterogeneous workers and firms. Permanent residents and native-born workers search for jobs in the same labor market and engage in on-the-job search, while TFWs search separately within a segmented labor market and do not receive outside wage offers. We calibrate the model to match our reduced-form results, and we use it to simulate the long-run effects of PR and consider two counterfactual policies: (1) increasing the cost to firms of posting a TFW vacancy and (2) allowing TFWs to switch employers freely under “open” visas. We evaluate how these policies affect output, wages, profits, and overall social welfare. |
| JEL: | F22 J42 J61 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34630 |