This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'Journal of Economics and Management Strategy', forthcoming.<P> Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical...</p>

When verifiable performance measures are imperfect, organizations often resort to subjective performance pay. This may give supervisors the power to direct employees towards tasks that mainly benefit the supervisor rather than the organization. We cast a principal-supervisor-agent model in a...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory</I> (2013). Volume 32(1), pages 1-31.<P> Contract audits aimed at reducing information asymmetry and transaction costs are frequently used in imperfect markets such as defense procurement. This contradicts...</p></i>

This paper examines the relationship between organization contextual variables and humanresource management (HRM) practices in small firms. The proposed model is based on anintegration of theoretical perspectives, including the resource-based approach, institutionaltheory, transaction cost...

We manipulate workers' perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that workers exert more effort when meaning is high, corroborating previous findings on...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

This paper presents a unified theory of human capital with both health capital and, what we term, skill capital endogenously determined within the model. By considering joint investment in health capital and in skill capital, the model highlights similarities and differences in these two...

This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272710000721">'Journal of Public Economics'</A>. The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into...</a>

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balancedskill profiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not havingtaken this possible linkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impactsboth of risk aversion and balanced skills on...