The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

When verifiable performance measures are imperfect, organizations often resort to subjective performance pay. This may give supervisors the power to direct employees towards tasks that mainly benefit the supervisor rather than the organization. We cast a principal-supervisor-agent model in a...

We study hiring in a labor market where worker ability can only be observed on-the-job, but quickly becomes public information after labor market entry. We show that firms in these markets have a socially inefficient incentive to hire low talented, experienced workers instead of more promising...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

We investigate whether national borders within Europe hinder the assortative matching of workers to firms in a high skilled labor market. We characterize worker productivity as the ability to contribute to physical output and define firm productivity as the capacity to transform physical output...

The Portuguese economy has been characterised by modernisation sincethe post-war period. Lisbon and the Tagus Valley is a centre of thisprocess. Hence, this region faces a high demand for highly skilledlabour. This paper analyses rates of return on human capital in theregion of Lisbon and in the...