When a firm has external debt and monitoring by shareholders is essential, managerial bonuses are shown to be an optimal solution. A small managerial bonus linked to firm's performance not only reduces moral hazard between managers and shareholders, but also between creditors and monitoring...

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract...

We analyze the contracting structure in a moral hazard setting with several agents where output is produced jointly and is the only contractible variable. Since the salary of each agent is a function of all agents efforts, a positive externality arises between them. This externality is not...

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previous papers,...

Contingency formulations of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory suggest that the effectiveness of HRM practices should vary across firms. This study examined whether the relationship between HRM practices and productivity in manufacturing companies is contingent upon organizational climate...

Overall, collective bargaining coverage has dropped by around fourteen percentage points. This paper investigates the causes and consequences of the decline in collective bargaining in Britain between 1990 and 1998. One in three workplaces that practiced collective bargaining in 1990 had...

Equal opportunities policies and family-friendly practices are examined using data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey in order to assess (i) their associations with union recognition and strategic human resource management and (ii) the outcomes of what has recently been described...

This paper uses the Management and Employee Questionnaires from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to consider whether the performance of workplaces which offer a range of family-friendly policies are superior to that of workplaces without such practices. It is found that in...

All that we know about the CEO labour market in China comes from studies of public listed companies and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper is the first to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all sectors of the Chinese economy. We do so using World Bank enterprise data...

Can unions substitute a procedural justice role for their traditional reliance on establishing a ‘common rule’? The decline of ‘bureaucratic’ models of employee management and the rise of performance pay and performance management conflicts with the common rule as management seek to tie...