We analyze how agents' present bias affects optimal contracting in an infinite-horizon employment setting. The principal maximizes profits by offering a menu of contracts to naive agents: a virtual contract - which agents plan to choose in the future - and a real contract which they end up...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift-exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. Results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage-gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We control for differences in...

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

The Microfinance industry has been severely affected by Covid-19. We provide detailed insights into how loan officers, the key personnel linking the lender to its borrowers, are affected in their performance and adapt their work to the pandemic. We use administrative records of an Indian...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

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...

The positive role of transformational leadership on productivity and mental wellbeing has long been established. Transformational leadership behavior may be particularly suited to navigate times of crisis which are characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. We exploit...

We study how firms adjust the bundles of management practices they adopt over time, using repeated survey data collected in Germany from 2012 to 2018. By employing unsupervised machine learning, we leverage high-dimensional data on human resource policies to describe clusters of management...

We study management practices and performance in a representative sample of German municipalities, which provide the bulk of direct administrative services for citizens and firms in Germany. Surveyed municipalities differ substantially in their use of structured management practices, and this...

Round numbers affect behavior in various domains, e.g., as prominent thresholds or focal points in bargaining. In line with earlier findings, residential real estate transactions in Germany cluster at round-number prices, but there are also interesting (presumably cultural) differences. We...