We develop a theory in which a lower cost of job loss reduces the compensating wage premium workers require to join risky young firms. Lower labor costs encourage high-upside experimentation and raise productivity. Because experimentation is not directly observable, we exploit its life-cycle structure: experimentation risk is concentrated among young firms and resolved as firms mature. Using Danish matched employer-employee data and labor-market variation, we show that higher job-finding rates are associated with a lower young-mature wage differential. A randomized survey experiment supports the mechanism: worsening unemployment prospects increases the premium workers require to accept employment at higher-failure-risk young firms.

Using survey experiments in the United States and Germany with about 12,000 participants, we study perceptions of socioeconomic inequality in life expectancy and policy demand. Respondents overestimate the rich-poor gap in both countries, judging the life expectancy of the rich roughly accurately but placing that of the poor well below its true level. These misperceptions vary little with political orientation or other characteristics. Correcting them shifts concern but leaves policy demand largely unchanged across general, specific, and real-stakes measures. Instead, demand divides politically, sharply in the United States and much less in Germany, consistent with views about the role of government rather than the inequality itself shaping policy demand.

In this study, establishment-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany are estimated. In addition to the quantitative effects, I provide empirical evidence of funding effects on different aspects of employment quality (earnings, qualifications, and job security) for the period 2004 to 2020. The database combines project-level treatment data, establishment-level information on firm characteristics and employee structure, and regional information at the district level. For the estimations, I combine the difference-in-differences approach of Callaway and Sant’Anna (J Econom 2252: 200–230, 2021) with ties matching at the cohort level. The estimations yield positive effects on the number of employees, but point to contradicting effects of investment grants on different aspects of employment quality.

More individualistic countries experience higher economic growth. We provide evidence for a human-capital-based explanation of the growth effects of individualism. Using data from the largest international adult skill assessment, we establish that individualism shapes human capital formation. We identify the effects of individualism by exploiting variation between migrants at the origin-country, origin-language, and person level. Migrants from more individualistic cultures have higher cognitive skills and larger skill gains over time. They also invest more in their skills over the life cycle, as they acquire more years of schooling and are more likely to participate in adult education activities. Individualism is more important in explaining adult skill formation than any other cultural trait that previous literature has emphasized. In the labor market, more individualistic migrants earn higher wages and are less often unemployed. We show that our results cannot be explained by selective migration or omitted origin-country variables.

This article shows that when a compensation peer firm experiences a significant failure in its say-on-pay (SOP) voting, the focal firm’s stock price is adversely affected, resulting in reduced CEO pay in the subsequent period. This pay-reduction effect is amplified when the board is more powerful, when proxy advisors express concerns about CEO pay, and when the compensation consultant lacks quality. Directors who react to the price drop and cut the CEO’s pay receive higher votes in future director elections, implying a market feedback effect for directors of the focal firm triggered by their peers’ SOP voting failure.

While the drastic physical impacts of climate change and related natural hazards are increasingly apparent, little is known about the long-term behavioral consequences of climate change-related experiences. Psychological evidence suggests that climate change (CC)-related experiences induce people to make more climate-friendly choices. Building on Upper Echelons Theory and relevant psychological literature, we investigate whether early-life natural hazard experiences of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are associated with more climate-friendly policies during their tenure. Our sample covers decisions taken between 1991 and 2018 by 447 US-born CEOs. While we observe an effect of hazard experiences on climate policies, we do not observe the same effect when focusing only on CC-related experiences. This result is robust across different measures of corporate climate performance.

We examine how institutional saving mechanisms influence retirement saving decisions under bounded rationality and income risk. Using a life-cycle experiment with habit formation and loss aversion, we test mandatory and voluntary binding savings under deterministic and stochastic income. Voluntary commitment improves saving performance only when income is predictable; under uncertainty, it fails to improve performance. Mandatory savings do not raise total saving, as participants reduce voluntary contributions. These results emphasize the role of income smoothing in enabling behavioral interventions to improve long-term financial outcomes.