We study contractual arrangements that support an efficient use of time in a knowledge-intensive economy in which agents endogenously specialize in either production or consulting. The resulting market for advice is plagued by informational problems, since both the difficulty of the questions...

The introduction of performance-related pay with Performance Management in the state school sector of England and Wales represents a considerable change in the school management system. After 2000, all teachers were subject to annual goal setting performance reviews. Experienced teachers were...

This paper considers one of the paradoxes of incentive pay used in Britain's public services, namely that despite much evidence that it does not motivate employees, it continues to be widely used. It is argued that behind this evidence, there are significant examples in which its use has been...

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of product market competition on the explicit compensationpackages that firms offer to their executives. In order to measure the net effect of competition we use twodifferent identification strategies. The first exploits cross sectoral variation in...

We show that worker wellbeing is not only related to the amount of compensation workers receive but also how they receive it. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been pre-occupied with individual performance-related pay, we here demonstrate a robust positive link between the...

Tournaments are designed to enhance participants' effort and productivity. However, ranking near the top may increase psychological pressure and reduce performance. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on performance using data from international diving tournaments. We find that...

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that workers who accept the gift reciprocate with greater loyalty and effort. But...

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than "like" employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to extensive work, wage and sickness absence history controls. We present a model...

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal-agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. Using data for China we examine their incidence and test propositions from...

In efficient global labour markets for very high wage workers one might expect wage differentials between migrant and domestic workers to reflect differences in labour productivity. However, using panel data on worker-firm matches in a single industry over a seven year period we find a...