This discussion paper led to a publication in the <I>European Economic Review</I> (2013). Vol. 60, pp. 91-104.<P> We develop a theory of leadership that focuses on the role managersplay in motivating employees through their attitude towards employees. We modela manager's attitude as her perception about...</p></i>

Parker and Van Praag (2009) showed, based on theory, that the group status of the profession ‘entrepreneurship’ shapes people’s occupational preferences and thus their choice behavior. The current study focuses on the determinants and consequences of the group status of a profession,...

The business performance of firms in the creative high-tech sector shows much variation. This paper examines whether the geographical location of such business firms influences the performance of these firms. The overarching analysis framework of this paper emerges from the recently developed...

We study the relation between formal incentives and social exchange in organizations where employees work for several managers and reciprocate to a manager's attention with higher effort. To this end we develop a common agency model with two-sided moral hazard. We show that when effort is...

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition is...

What is the effect of dispersed levels of cognitive ability of members of a (business) team on their team’s performance? This paper reports the results of a field experiment in which 573 students in 49 teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. We ensured exogenous...

This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the <I>Journal of Economic Psychology</I>, 31(4), 676-686.<P> We study optimal incentive contracts for workers who are reciprocal to management attention. When neither worker's effort nor manager's attention can be contracted, a double moral-hazard...</p></i>

Using survey data of public sector employees in the Netherlands, this paper shows that workers' satisfaction with various job domains not only affects whether but also where workers search for another job. An intuitive pattern emerges. Workers try to leave their current employer when their job...

This paper offers a new theory of discrimination in the workplace. We consider a manager who has to assign two tasks to two employees. The manager has superior information about the employees' abilities. We show that besides an equilibrium where the manager does not discriminate, equilibria...

This paper studies how morale in teams can break down. It interprets high morale as team members working together productively, either because of a sense of fairness or because of implicit incentives from repeated interactions. Team members learn that lay-offs will occur at a fixed future date,...