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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the turnover and promotion of male and female lawyers, using data on two cohorts of lawyers; one which entered law firms between 1969 and 1973, and the other entering between 1980 and 1983. This study considers whether law firm promotion decisions have differed for women, and if so, whether these differences have declined over time.A competing risks duration model is employed to capture the link between the lawyer's decision to stay or leave and the firm's decision to grant or deny promotion. We find that over the entire sample period, women are considerably less likely to be promoted and slightly more likely to leave the firm without being promoted. However, we also find that the parametric differential between men and women in partnership hazards has been reduced substantially, and in the most general of our specifications, eliminated across the two cohorts. In contrast, the gap between male and female job turnover rates does not appear to change over time. We find that the gap between males and females in the cumulative partnership rate at seven years of experience falls from 32 to 14 percent. The turnover gap increases about 0.2 percent, with females slightly more likely to exit from the firm in the later period.

This paper considers how the decision to enter advanced practice nursing (e.g., the occupations of nurse practitioner, certified nurse-midwife, nurse anesthetist, and clinical nurse specialist) is affected by State laws on the scope of practice of APNs. We find that enrollments in APN programs are 30 percent higher in States where APNs have a high level of professional independence. Our work differs from previous studies by estimating a fixed effects model on cross-sectional and time series data, to avoid problems of endogeneity of State laws.

The purpose of this study is to examine the causes and effects of State regulation that determines the extent of professional independence of advanced practice nurses (APNs). We analyze determinants of these regulations in panel data across States.We find that in States where APNs have acquired a substantial amount of professional independence, the earnings of APNs are substantially lower, and those of physicians' assistants are substantially higher, than in other States. These results are striking since physicians' assistants are in direct competition with APNs; the only real operational difference between these groups is that physicians' assistants are salaried employees who must work under the supervision of a physician. The implication is that physicians have responded to an increase in professional independence of APNs by hiring fewer APNs and more physicians' assistants.

The authors analyze the promotion, demotion, and turnover of pitchers in baseball's minor leagues-a labor market for which exceptionally good data on performance are available-in the years 1975-88. They find that the time between a player's assignment to one league and promotion or demotion to another (or exit from professional baseball) declined as his performance deviated from the mean, in either a positive or negative direction. Also negatively associated with the time required to make a determination about a pitcher's ability was his age, which the authors use as a proxy for experience. Pitchers' ages did not, however, affect the highest league level in which they ultimately played.There is a substantial theoretical literature in labor economics on issues of promotion and turnover-optimal incentive arrangements, tournaments, screening, hierarchies, and the matching of workers and firms. This research has yielded implications that would have been difficult to foresee. For example, work on the span of managerial control and tournaments (Rosen 1982(Rosen , 1986) has offered ajustification for what might otherwise seem excessive compensation for top managers.At a certain stage in the evolution of a literature, one expects the emergence of empirical work that will influence the direction of the theory by enabling researchers to choose among competing hypoth-Legal Organization workshop of the University of Chicago for extremely helpful comments and suggestions. eses. To date, however, there has been very little empirical analysis of the relation between measures of performance and the progress of workers through a hierarchy. One exception is research examining the effect of publications on the tenure and promotion of professors (for example, Weiss and Lillard 1982). This exception indeed proves the rule, since the research output of professors is more easily measured and evaluated than the output of lawyers, physicians, executives, and workers in most other occupations. If, as appears to be the case, the difficulty of measuring workers' performance has been a serious hindrance to empirical work on this subject, there is much to be said for choosing a setting in which good data on performance are available.

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Using nationally representative data from the U.S., this paper analyzed the effect of a state’s medical malpractice environment on referral visits received by specialist physicians. The analytic sample included 12,839 ambulatory visits to specialist care doctors in office-based settings in the U.S. during 2003–2007. Whether the patient was referred for the visit was examined for its association with the state’s malpractice environment, assessed by the frequency and severity of paid medical malpractice claims, medical malpractice insurance premiums, and an indicator for whether the state had a cap on noneconomic damages. After accounting for potential confounders such as economic or professional incentives within practices, the analysis showed that statutory caps on noneconomic damages of $250,000 were significantly associated with lower likelihood of a specialist receiving referrals, suggesting a potential impact of a state’s medical malpractice environment on physicians’ referral behavior.