Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

This paper examines the consequences of creating a fully competitive market in a sector previously dominated by a cost-minimizing public firm. Workers in the economy are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work in the sector. In line with empirical findings, our model implies that...

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store’s manager...

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 positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly...

We conduct a field experiment among 189 stores of a retail chain to study dynamic incentive effects of relative performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores from the control group over the course of four weeks....