Expenditure Ceilings

Expenditure ceilings, multilateral financial institutions, and the health of poor populations.

Multiple Glass Ceilings

Multiple Glass Ceilings Both vertical (between job levels) and horizontal (within job levels) mobility can be sources of wage growth. We find that the glass ceiling operates at both margins. The unexplained part of the wage gap grows across job levels (glass ceiling at the vertical margin) and across the deciles of the intra-job-level wage distribution (glass ceiling at the horizontal margin). ...

Ceilings of Monotone Boolean Functions

This paper considers a particular relationship defined over pairs of n-argument monotone Boolean functions. The relationship is of interest since we can show that if ( g, h ) satisfy it then for any n-argument monotone Boolean function f there is a close relationship between the combinational and monotone network complexities of the function (f /\ g) \/ h. We characterise the class of pairs of ...

Rat Races and Glass Ceilings

In an ongoing organization, such as a large law partnership firm, employees are motivated not only by current rewards but also by the prospect of promotion, and the opportunity to make the rules in the future. This leads to a recursive contract design problem in an overlapping generations environment, where current agents may become future principals. The principal offers, and promotion-motivat...

The Economics of Death Ceilings

Incentive design involves a tradeoff between motivating agents and distorting their efforts; for many tasks the distortions are such that flat rewards may be optimal. Yet organizations of all types from school boards to the FBI increasingly utilize rewards based on observable performance metrics. We describe the effects of one such attempt, implemented in 2004, to motivate Chinese bureaucrats t...