Contemporary dynamic theories of self-employment choice focus on occupational switching costs, and the risk associated with entrepreneurial income streams. However little or no previous research has addressed the question of what factors determine the length of time that it takes aspiring...

Comparing domestic- and foreign-owned firms in Germany, this paper finds that foreign-owned firms are more likely to focus on short-term profit. This influence is particularly strong if the local managers of the German subsidiary are not sent from the foreign parent company. Moreover, the...

We develop a rationale for the payment by firms of a wage premium on marginal, or overtime, weekly hours. We examine wage-hours contracts within the framework of a two-period specific human capital model with asymmetric information. The wage premium serves to achieve contract efficiency. For...

Employer learning about workers' abilities plays a key role in determining how workers sort into jobs and are compensated. This study explores whether learning is symmetric or asymmetric, i.e., whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I...

Implementing performance pay requires that workers' output be measured. When measurement costs differ among firms, those with a measurement cost advantage choose to implement performance pay. They attract the best workers, and both the level and variability of compensation are higher at these...

This paper shows that monitoring too much a partner in the initial phase of a relationship may not be optimal if the goal is to determine his loyalty to the match and if the cost of ending the relationship increases over time. The intuition is simple: by monitoring too much we learn less on how...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team ("black sheep") exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a "wall of silence"). Much cited...