Essays in applied personnel, behavioral, and financial economics

This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each focusing on a particular area of applied economics. In chapter one, the effects of pay compression are discussed. Proponents of pay compression argue that a higher echelon of intrafirm earnings equality can be efficient as it disincentivizes uncooperative behavior amongst employees, particularly when rewards are based upon a relative comparison of performance. Here, I employ an unbalanced panel of data from the National Hockey League (NHL) to examine the impact of pay disparity on team-cohesiveness. I find evidence to suggest the existence of a negative relationship between higher degrees of within-position pay disparity and team performance; the evidence reported here shows the elasticity of team performance with respect to pay disparity is roughly 19%. In chapter two, I model and empirically test the hypothesis that higher-quality workers of homogenous risk-preference realize what I term “implicit economic rents” under pay-for-performance schemes; I find strong empirical evidence to confirm that these implicit rents exist and I measure them at (roughly) and additional 1.5–3.4 percent of average hourly earnings. Financial economics are discussed in chapter 3. Granting the basic assumption of rational expectations, this research aims to isolate the financial strategies which promote investment gains in the domestic medical-market biotechnology industry using event study methodology. To what degree do stock-holders extend or withhold external finance to or from publicly-traded biotechnology firms and why? To address these questions, two firms and nine different firm strategies suspected of possessing a causal relationship with market valuation are considered: Of these various strategies, the results suggest that the most significant events favorably altering investor valuation of firms in the diagnostic segment of the biotechnology market are those which are distributional and knowledge-gathering in nature. Buyouts of firms in the therapeutic segment of the biotechnology market play a large role in the extraction of external finance, particularly because the purchasing of another firms' previous labors can significantly lower the costs of bringing new products to market.