We study the impact of and reward to middle management ability using data from 245 stores of a nationwide retailer. The company scores six broad areas of management practice, the most important of which turns out to be "commercial awareness", where able managers raise labour productivity by 17%...

Die Beschäftigung in Deutschland ist in den letzten Jahren stark angestiegen, zu einem Teil auch in neuartigen und flexiblen Arbeitsverhältnissen, zu denen etwa die Zeitarbeit und die befristete Beschäftigung zählen. Damit hat sich eine Zweiteilung des Arbeitsmarktes in Arbeitsverhältnisse...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

The paper examines severance pay programs around the world by providing the first ever overview of existing programs, examining their historic development, assessing their economic rationale and describing current reform attempts. While a significant part of the paper is devoted to a...

This chapter reviews the literature on employment and labor law. The goal of the review is to understand why every jurisdiction in the world has extensive employment law, particularly employment protection law, while most economic analysis of the law suggests that less employment protection...

This paper examines both the determinants and the effects of changes in the rigidity of labor market legislation across countries over time. Recent research identifies the origin of the legal system as being a major determinant of the cross-country variation in the rigidity of employment...

The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of...

We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

We present results from a field experiment testing the gift-exchange hypothesis inside a treeplanting firm paying its workforce incentive contracts. Firm managers told a crew of tree planters they would receive a pay raise for one day as a result of a surplus not attributable to past planting...