We address the question how much authority a principal should delegate to a manager with conflicting interests and uncertain ability in a context in which the manager has both compensation-based and reputational incentives. The optimal level of authority balances the value of the manager's...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is known about how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a field experiment with more than 3000 participants, we document a positive effect of bonus incentives on the probability of completion...

An analytical framework is developed to study the repercussions between endogenous capital- and labor-saving technical change and population aging. Following an intuition often attributed to Hicks (1932), I ask whether and how population aging affects the relative scarcity of factors of...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we survey the way in which the tax burden on labour has been proxied for in recent multi-country macro-economic studies. Second, we critically evaluate these proxies. Finally, we examine to what extent the conclusions of some studies change if some...

This paper outlines the methodology used by the OECD in its Taxing Wages publication, compares this approach to other measures of the effective tax rate on labour and uses recent results to illustrate its use. It argues that the strength of this methodology lies in its ability to make...

The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor features prominently in several areas of economic research. However, a consensus estimate remains elusive. We develop an estimation strategy that filters panel data in an original way and avoids several pitfalls - difficult-to-specify...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model's posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we...

This paper examines how product market competition affects firms' timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives. It shows that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with Cournot and Bertrand...