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Report
Do informal referrals lead to better matches? Evidence from a firm's employee referral system
The limited nature of data on employment referrals in large business and household surveys has so far limited our understanding of the relationships among employment referrals, match quality, wage trajectories, and turnover. Using a new, firm-level data set that includes explicit information on whether a worker was referred by a current employee of the company, we are able to provide rich detail on these empirical relationships for a single U.S. corporation, and to test various predictions of theoretical models of labor market referrals. Predictions with which our results align include: 1) ...
Working Paper
Can Reputation Discipline the Gig Economy? Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market
Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer?s problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, where platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation ...