Paul Oyer’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore this by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber in the United States. We document a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers. We show that this gap can be entirely attributed to three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences and constraints over where to work (driven largely by where drivers live and, to a lesser extent, safety), and preferences for driving speed. We do not find that men and women are differentially affected by a taste for specific hours, a return to within-week work intensity, or customer discrimination. Our results suggest that, in a “gig” economy setting with no gender discrimination and highly flexible labor markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.

As the workforce ages, how will the work lives of older people evolve? One way to ease into retirement is to move to the gig economy where workers choose hours and intensity of work that fit their needs and capabilities. However, older workers are often reaping the benefits of the latter end of an implicit contract while gig economy workers are paid their marginal product. We show that age/earnings profiles in the traditional labor market are different than for Uber drivers. While the move to the gig economy generates flexibility, older workers are paid less than their younger coworkers.

The authors study the market for young attorneys. Using data from two surveys of attorneys who passed the bar exam in 2000, they find that attorneys who graduate from law schools ranked in the Top 10 nationally earn considerably more than those without such a qualification, even compared to attorneys who graduate from schools ranked 11–20. The premium to an elite education carries over to an attorney’s undergraduate institution as well, and the findings suggest that elite bachelor’s degrees and elite law degrees are close substitutes in terms of their relationships to salaries. The elite–law school premium is more robust to various methods for correcting for selection on ability than the widely studied premium to attending a selective undergraduate institution. The authors consider several reasons elite-school premiums may exist in this labor market.

We study the sources of match-specific value at large American law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. We measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by "natural advantage" factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive spillovers across graduates of a given school. We show that large law firms tend to be concentrated with regard to the law schools they hire from and that individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. There are two main drivers of variation in law school concentration within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, we show that school-based networks (and possibly productive spillovers) are important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when we instrument for partners' law schools.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Drawing on insights from corporate finance and personnel economics, we show that firms consider potential employees using a real options approach, much as they do when making other types of capital investment decisions. Theoretically we find that firms’ hiring decisions are influenced by the uncertainty in workers’ productivity, competition in the labor market, adjustment costs, and redeployability concerns. Firms value probationary employment arrangements that provide the option to learn about the productivity of potential hires before permanent investment occurs. Higher uncertainty and adjustment costs hinder permanent investment and increase the value of the option to learn. Greater competition for workers speeds up firm investment and increases the value of probationary employment. Higher worker redeployability leads to more investment, if firms face sufficiently low competition. We test and confirm these predictions empirically using a novel dataset with detailed recruiting information from the labor market for MBA graduates.

We study the sources of match-specific value at large American law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. We measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by "natural advantage" factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive spillovers across graduates of a given school. We show that large law firms tend to be concentrated with regard to the law schools they hire from and that individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. There are two main drivers of variation in law school concentration within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, we show that school-based networks (and possibly productive spillovers) are important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when we instrument for partners' law schools.

We measure the returns to attending a highly ranked law school using the "After the JD" survey of lawyers …rst passing the Bar Exam in 2000. In 2002 and 2007, those lawyers that went to top 10 law schools made, on average, 25% more than those that went to schools ranked 11-20 and over 50% more than those that went to schools ranked 21-100. Graduates of Top 10 schools were also much more likely to work in large law …rms in leading law markets. We use two methods to assess the degree of selection in the law school prestige premium – the methods developed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005), who focus on the relationship between observable and unobservable variables, and propensity score matching. We …nd that at least a third of the large returns to law school reputation are due to selection, but this selection is almost entirely on a single variable – quality of the undergraduate institution attended. Selection on other background characteristics is trivial. Whatever unobservables lead to selection into top undergraduate schools may also lead to selection into top law schools. Our results are consistent with a reasonably large causal e¤ect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.

We survey the Personnel Economics literature, focusing on how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees. This literature has been very successful in generating models and empirical work about incentive systems. Some of the unanswered questions in this area -- for example, the empirical relevance of the risk/incentive tradeoff and the question of whether CEO pay arrangements reflect competitive markets and efficient contracting -- are likely to be very difficult to answer due to measurement problems. The literature has been less successful at explaining how firms can find the right employees in the first place. Economists understand the broad economic forces -- matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information -- that firms face in trying to hire. But the main models in this area treat firms as simple black-box production functions. Less work has been done to understand how different firms approach the hiring problem, what determines the firm-level heterogeneity in hiring strategies, and whether these patterns conform to theory. We survey some literature in this area and suggest areas for further research.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We present evidence from a field experiment to evaluate the effects of team incentives. We compare three common incentive schemes: piece rates, interim feedback, and tournaments, and analyze behavioral responses along two margins: how workers sort into teams, and effort within the team. A theoretical framework makes precise that increasing the strength of in-centives can lead high ability workers to prefer to form teams with similarly skilled colleagues instead of workers they are socially connected to. However, if socially connected workers are better able to overcome free-riding within teams, the increased strength of incentives that changes team composition can reduce the firm's average productivity. Empirically, the pro-vision of feedback on teams' relative performance, and the introduction of monetary prize tournaments both increase assortative matching into teams by ability, and make it less likely workers form teams with colleagues they are socially connected to. Relative to piece rates, the additional provision of feedback to teams significantly reduces average productivity by 14%, while adding a tournament prize structure significantly increases it by 24%. Both effects are heterogeneous: feedback only affects teams at the bottom of the conditional productivity distribution, and tournaments only affect teams at the top. The analysis highlights new directions for research in understanding how agents react to monetary and non-monetary incentives in workplaces characterized by team production where teams form endogenously. seminar participants at Bergen, Harvard/MIT, IZA, Oxford, San Diego, Stanford, and Wharton for comments and suggestions that have helped improve the paper. We thank all those involved in providing the data. This paper has been screened to ensure no confidential information is revealed. All errors remain our own.