Around 40% of employees in Canada work within 5 km of their place of residence, highlighting workers' preference for proximity to workplace. I leverage a subway expansion in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics, and show that workers who gained improved access to the subway network experienced an increase in earnings by 1.5-2%. The effect is driven by job switchers who travel farther to new employers. To interpret these findings, I build, identify, and estimate a two-sided labor market matching model featuring wage-posting, commuting costs, and residential choice. Using the estimated model I replicate the reduced form effects, and show that the expansion reallocated workers to more productive firms. I also show that labor market concentration dropped by 10-35% in treated areas due to the expansion. Separately, I use the model to shed light on the role of preference for proximity in shaping the spatial distribution of wage markdowns.

Performance evaluations in interviews are central to employment decisions.We combine two field experiments, administrative data and video analysis tostudy the sources of gender gaps in interview evaluations. Leveraging 60,000 mock interviews on a platform for software engineers, we find that code quality ratings are 12 percent of a standard deviation lower for women. This gap persists after controlling for an objective measure of code quality. Providing evaluators with automated performance measures does not reduce gender gaps. Comparing blind to non-blind evaluations without live interaction reveals no gender gap in either case. In contrast, gaps widen with longer personal interaction and are larger among evaluators from regions with stronger implicit gender bias. Video analysis shows that women apologize more; and interviewers are more condescending and harsher with them. Both correlate with lower ratings. Our findings highlight how interpersonal dynamics can introduce bias into evaluations that otherwise rely on objective metrics.

This paper investigates how firms allocate employees with different skills in its hierarchy, and the consequences on within firm inequality. Since Ricardo, economists have recognized the gains from specialization and the division of labor. In order to take advantage of such specialization, the firm has to produce many task outputs and aggregate them into different final products. Each firm has to decide which tasks to do, who to hire to do them and to coordinate the production and aggregation of these different task outputs. Builiding on Chandler (1993), this paper provides an analytic framework which shows who does what in the organization which, in the end, produces different task outputs to be aggregated into different final products. The two level hierarchy, consisting of a supervisor and their subordinates, is the building block of this organizational perspective. Complex hierarchies are obtained by concatenating multiple two level hierarchies. Transfer pricing provides a mechanism to coordinate each two level hierarchy to produce its efficient level of task output. The CEO chooses tasks and executive managers to do those tasks. Given the CEO choices, each executive manager chooses other tasks and subordinates to do those, and so on. The choice of tasks by the CEO affects the productivity of executive managers and propagate further down the chain of command. In this way, strategic and communicational skills of higher level managers have large productivity effects on the firm than the skills of lower level managers, explaining why the growth of managerial earnings increase with the level of the hierarchy

It is well known that import competition can have strong negative effects on domestic workers. Shielding workers from these shocks is among the primary stated objectives of tariffs. In practice, however, tariffs often fail to increase domestic production. For example, the 2018 US tariffs on China benefited countries such as Thailand and Vietnam far more than domestic producers. These third country effects cannot be explained by workhorse trade models. We build on recent methodological advancements to assess the effect of bilateral tariff changes on sectoral employment while incorporating third country effects. Our framework combines flexible substitution patterns with an otherwise standard model of labor market frictions. The effects of tariffs in this environment are heterogeneous across workers and products, providing a rich laboratory for counterfactual analyses. We use our model to quantify the efficacy of tariffs in protecting domestic workers and reversing job losses from free trade.