Subjective performance evaluations are commonly used to provide feedback and incentives to workers. However, such evaluations can generate significant disagreements and conflicts, the severity of which may be driven by many factors. In this paper we show that a workers' level of self-confidence...

We study a principal-agent model in which the agent can provide ex post additional relevant information regarding his performance. In particular, he can provide a legitimate excuse, that is, evidence that a poor result is only due to factors outside his control. However, building a convincing...

More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred;...

In this paper we ague that any meaningful bibliometric evaluation of researchers needs to take into account that research productivity follows distinct life cycles. Using an encompassing data set portraying the research behavior of German academic economists, we first show that research...

This paper considers the effects of an interim performance evaluation on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Assuming the agents ́outside option to be determined by market beliefs about their type, interim evaluations (a) provide...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing information to principals about teacher...

This paper examines the performance of 358 European diversified equity mutual funds controlling for gender differences. Fund performance is evaluated against funds' designated market indices and representative style portfolios. Consistently with previous studies, no significant differences in...

An inherent problem with comparing and ranking competing Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected shortfall (ES) models is that they measure only a single realization of the underlying data generation process. The question is whether there is any significant statistical difference in the performance of...

Beginning with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act of 1989, central banking reforms have focused on assigning clear goals for which monetary policy authorities can be held accountable. Inflation targeting regimes provide examples of such goal-based policy frameworks. An alternative approach,...

This paper evaluates the Morningstar mutual fund ranking system. We find that indeed higher Morningstar ratings are associated with higher returns on the portfolios including respectively five-, four-, three-, two- and one-star funds only (STAR5 to STAR1). We then perform an unconditional and...