We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

This paper analyzes the optimal contracting consequences of a recent phenomenon in the managerial labour market, CEO job hopping. I show that if the managerial labour market is thin and firm growth opportunities are weak, the optimal contract rewards the CEO for past performance through a bonus....

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment...

We use personnel data to compare worker productivity under a relative incentive scheme, where worker pay is negatively related to the average productivity of co-workers, with productivity under piece rates – where pay is based on individual productivity alone. We find that for the average...

Sweden offers a unique natural experiment to analyze the microeconomic effects of institutionalized saving on ownership structure, corporate governance and performance of listed companies. First, the Swedish pension reform increased the participation of pension funds in the domestic stock market...

Casual observation suggests that capital allocation is often driven by favouritism and connections rather than by market mechanisms and information on future expected returns. We investigate when favouritism or markets emerge as an equilibrium outcome in the allocation of capital. We show that...

We investigate whether cultural differences between professional decision-makers affect financial contracts in a large dataset of international syndicated bank loans. We find that lead banks offer smaller loans at a higher interest rate to more culturally distant borrowers. Furthermore, lead...

An intense debate on the use of limited-voting shares developed in the UK during the 1950s. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we show that negative news coverage of limited-voting shares is associated with an increase in the relative price of voting and limited-voting shares (the voting...