Essays in labor economics

This dissertation is composed of three chapters. The first two chapters look at the productivity of knowledge workers who experience changes in the composition of their peers. The third chapter examines compensation differences for executives located in different labor markets. In each case, the context in which the workers are working is important for their productivity or compensation.;Chapter one uses large pharmaceutical mergers to understand the importance of inventor networks for research productivity. I compare the pre and post merger patenting productivity of inventors working on different types of drugs. I find that inventors working in areas where the firm they are merging with is stronger have larger increases in productivity as measured by both patents per inventor per year and citations per patent.;Chapter two is joint work with C. Kirabo Jackson. Using student examination data linked to longitudinal teacher personnel data, we document that a teacher's students have larger test score gains when she experiences an improvement in the quality of the other teachers in her same grade and school. These spillovers are strongest for less experienced teachers, persist over time and teachers perform best when they are the weakest of their peer group--- suggesting a peer learning interpretation. Conditioning on historical peer quality reduces the explanatory power of individual teacher effects by twenty percent.;In chapter three, I look at the link between location and the compensation of the top executives of S&P 1500 firms. I show executives working for firms headquartered in metropolitan areas with more headquarters and more headquarters in the same industry have higher compensation relative to similar executives in other cities. Differences by industry headquarters persist even after controlling for average levels of executive compensation in each metropolitan area. I also find that executive turnover is lower in cities with fewer headquarters in the same industry, executives who do leave are less likely to find a top position at another S&P 1500 firm, and CEO's are less likely to be outsiders.