We empirically investigate if tournaments between heterogeneous contestants are less intense. To test our hypotheses we use professional sports data from the TOYOTA Handball-Bundesliga, the major handball league in Germany. Using either differences in betting odds or rankings to measure ability...

The importance of high salaries to circumvent bureaucratic corruption has been widely recognized in the policy debate. Yet, there appears to be much reluctance when it comes to the implementation. In this paper, we argue that deterring corruption through wage incentives may become prohibitively...

Abstract This note offers two comments on the article “Social Influences towards Conformism in Economic Experiments” by Hargreaves Heap that is to appear in the Economics e-Journal. One relates to the concept of conformism, the other lines out some phenomena where an explicit recognition of...

In this paper, we assess the effects of the Italian labour market reforms which began in 2001 and which led to widespread deployment of temporary work contracts. Using a hitherto unexploited administrative dataset of work histories for the period 2003-2010, we estimate transition probabilities...

We propose a dynamic efficiency wage model with learning by doing. By taking into account the change inthe stock of workers’ knowledge, firms set efficiency wages such that the effort–wage elasticity is not in general equal to one.

Heterogeneous firms facing demand-induced price fluctuations imperfectly compete for heterogeneous workers. It is shown that unemployment may arise in equilibrium because of the combination of uncertainty on product price and mismatch between workers’ skills and firms’ job requirements.

In 1990 a reform in Italy has modified the employment protection legislation for employees of small firms (with fewer than 16 employees) making much more costly for firms to dismiss workers, while leaving unchanged the employment protection in large firms. Using a sample of administrative data...

In neoclassical economic theory the level of individual income is predominantly determined by individual job performance. Thus high incomes reflect the high marginal productivity of labour of the affluent working population. While the scientific research of poverty has a long tradition, nearly...

This paper uses a field experiment to investigate the quality of individuals' forecasts of relative performance in tournaments. We ask players in luck-based (poker) and skill-based (chess) tournaments to make point forecasts of rank. The main finding of the paper is that players' forecasts in...

We propose a modified version of the Shapiro-Stiglitz’s (1984) efficiency wage model by introducing temporary contracts in the standard setup. New theoretical insights emerge on the incentive problem faced by workers and firms. We argue that the existence of temporary contracts broaden the...