I am on the job market and will be available for interviews at the AEA meetings on January 4-6, 2008 in New Orleans, LA

Fields:

Primary: Labor Economics, Microeconomic Theory

Secondary: Growth, International Macroeconomics

Job Market paper:

“Career Uncertainty and Dynamic Incentives”

Abstract. Career concerns are known to provide incentives even when performance-based compensation is not feasible. Previous literature assumes that ability is equally valuable everywhere. I analyze the model where ability is career-specific and individuals can escape bad reputation by changing their careers. The possibility of changing the career makes collection of reputational rewards less likely and therefore dampens incentives. However, I show that the wage becomes more sensitive to the reputation since the market anticipates the workers with good career matches to exert more effort. This effect countervails the direct incentive-weakening effect of career uncertainty. In fact it may be so strong that the expected marginal return on the reputation increases and the worker who is less certain about her career prospects puts in more effort as a result. I show that equilibrium effort is higher for workers facing moderate career uncertainty if their effort is sufficiently responsive to incentives. In general, both oversupply and undersupply of effort can occur in the equilibrium. One way to control the strength of reputational incentives is to manipulate the timing of information release: delaying the release of performance data weakens the incentives and can help avoiding excessive effort supply early in the career.

“Specialization under Uncertainty,” joint with Natalia Kovrijnykh

References: