In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhapswhen workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability andoutput in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect oftournaments is thin...

Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical dataon induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in acontrolled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory:effort and sabotage...

The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often placeemployees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second,demotions are extremely rare...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find littleevidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We performthe first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a uniquelongitudinal dataset...

To investigate the size and the timing of the direct impact of participatory arrangements onbusiness performance, we assemble and analyze extraordinary daily data – for rejection,production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period,more than 77,000...

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representativedeveloping country with a large unregulated of “informal” sector. It confirms the relevance ofthe recent mainstream models and debates surrounding gross worker flows to the developingcountry context,...

Within an efficiency wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reformsthat change the progressivity of the labour tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both thewage tax and tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labourtaxation towards the tax...

A dynamic labor matching economy is presented, in which the unemployed are either entitledto unemployment insurance (UI) or unemployment assistance (UA), and the employees areeither eligible for UI or UA upon future separations. Eligibility for UI requires a minimumduration of contributions and...

Using the 1996-2001 Chilean CASEN Panel Survey, this paper analyzes the impact onincome of the switch from salaried employment to entrepreneurship (self-employment andleadership of micro-enterprises). By means of a difference-in-differences non-parametricmatching estimator the paper alleviates...

Recent theoretical work has examined the spatial distribution of unemployment using theefficiency wage model as the mechanism by which unemployment arises in the urbaneconomy. This paper extends the standard efficiency wage model in order to allow forbehavioral substitution between leisure time...