To what extent, if at all, did employee-owned (EO) firms maintain jobs for workers compared to non-EO firms in the spring 2020 Covid-19 shock to the US economy? Did EO firms shift jobs from workplaces to work-from-home locations in the pandemic more or less than other firms? This paper uses a...

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "Discover Your Purpose" intervention among 2,976 white-collar employees and...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates....

When an employee expects repeated evaluation and performance incentives over time, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in building relevant skills. Because new skills benefit job performance, the effects of an evaluation program can persist after the rewards end or even...

Using more than 4,900 assessments, we study changes in the characteristics and objectives of CEOs and top executives since 2001. The same four factors explain roughly half of the variation of assessed CEO characteristics in this larger sample of executive assessments as in Kaplan and Sorensen...

In organizations, teams are ubiquitous. "Weakest Link" and "Best Shot" are incentive schemes that tie a group member's compensation to the output of their group's least and most productive member, respectively. In this paper, we test the impact of these incentive schemes by conducting two pilot...

Many have observed that individuals perform worse after having received a promotion. The most famous statement of the idea is the Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. There are a number of possible explanations. Two are explored. The most...

In three sets of experiments involving over 4,200 subjects, we show that agents motivated to be selfish make systematic decision errors of the kind generally attributed to cognitive limitations or behavioral biases. We show that these decision errors are eliminated (or dramatically reduced) when...

We critically review the emerging literature in Organizational and Personnel Economics concerning the role of managers and management practices. Our focus is on the middle managers who populate the hierarchies between top executives and front-line employees. We are especially concerned with...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...