We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

This paper uses detailed information from a large wage survey in 2006 to analyze the gender wage gap in the performance-pay (PP) component of total hourly wages and its contribution to the overall gender gap in Spain. Under the assumption that PP is determined in a more competitive fashion than...

A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are...

It is well known in personnel economics that firms may improve the quality of their workforce by offering performance pay. We analyse an equilibrium model where worker productivity is private information and show that the gains to the firms from worker self-selection may not be matched by a...

This paper analyzes the impact of labor market competition and skill-biased technical change on the structure of compensation. The model combines multitasking and screening, embedded into a Hotelling-like framework. Competition for the most talented workers leads to an escalating reliance on...