This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton’s neoclassical approach, Sen’s commitment approach, and Kirman et al.’s complexity approach. The primary focus is the...

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 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>

Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...

This paper explores the meaning and implications of the desire by workers for impact. We find that this impact motive can make a firm in a competitive labor market face an upward-sloping supply curve of labor, lead workers with the same characteristics but at different firms to earn different...

This paper employs a unique set of micro-data covering almost one third of the Dutch labor force, to estimate the relationship between agglomeration externalities and the level of education. While the positive relationship between economic density and productivity and wages has long been...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

This paper examines the consequences of creating a fully competitive market in a sector previously dominated by a cost-minimizing public firm. Workers in the economy are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work in the sector. In line with empirical findings, our model implies that...

The U.S. unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high since the 2007-2009 recessionleading many to conclude that structural, rather than cyclical, factors are to blame. Relying on astandard job search and matching framework and empirical evidence from a wide array of labormarket indicators, we...