We use a mechanism-design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade-off between adaptation and motivation. We...

Differences in the labour market experiences of men and women have fallen over the last 20 years, but there are still sizeable 'gender gaps' in employment and wages. Certain factors help to explain a good part of gender gaps, including caring for young children, occupational choice and part-time...

Lab experiments are an increasingly valuable tool for understanding differences in how men and women are treated in the labour market. Dr Ghazala Azmat and Professor Barbara Petrongolo explore what has been learned about the extent to which differences in men and women's pay and employment...

In the psychology literature, "choking under pressure" refers to a behavioural response to an increase in the stakes. In a natural experiment, we study the gender difference in performance resulting from changes in stakes. We use detailed information on the performance of high-school students...

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individuals' performance and affective response, under both piece-rate and flat-rate incentives. In a laboratory setup, agents perform a real effort task and when receiving feedback, they are asked to rate...

Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer analyse data on young lawyers to understand what drives differences in earnings between highly skilled men and women.

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike most high-skilled professions, the legal profession uses widely-accepted and objective methods to measure and reward lawyers' productivity: the number of hours billed to clients...

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigration, austerity, real wages and living standards, productivity and business,...

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance under piece-rate incentives. A natural experiment that took place in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effect in a real-effort setting. For one year only, students received...

Labor's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...