Showing 1 - 10 of 16
In Bartling, Fehr and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort and (iv)...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011210865
Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011210890
This paper reports on a two-task principal-agent experiment in which only one task is contractible. The principal can either offer a piece-rate contract or a (voluntary) bonus to the agent. Bonus contracts strongly outperform piece rate contracts. Many principals reward high efforts on both...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005157507
In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These “high-performance work systems” are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008513084
We analyse trade between countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990. Despite central planning and political motivation of the CMEA, we show that trade could be explained by standard demand factors surprisingly well. Moreover, we document that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004988389
Russian banks have been strongly influenced by the worldwide financial crisis which started in the second half of 2008. This was caused by a combination of domestic, regional and international factors. We estimate an early warning model for the Russian crisis. We identified 47 Russian banks...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005042020
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005187305
We analyze the determinants of the corporate interest rates and the financial accelerator in the Czech Republic. Using a unique panel of 448 Czech firms from 1996 to 2002, we find that selected balance sheet indicators influence significantly the firm-specific interest rates. In particular, debt...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005187325
A panel data set for six countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) is used to estimate money demand with panel cointegration methods over the recent disinflation period. The basic money demand model is able to convincingly explain the long-run dynamics of M2 in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005187338
Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005187348