This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...

Using a survey with 57 German firms, we evaluate the level of digitalization of the human resource management (HRM) function and document perceived benefits and barriers of technology adoption from organizational and individual users’ perspectives. The results give reason for optimism. Most of...

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...

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...

This paper examines the reliance on ESG metrics in executive compensation contracts. In our sample of international publicly traded firms, a rapidly growing fraction incorporate ESG metrics in the compensation schemes of their top executives. Our analysis links the reliance on these metrics to...

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on endogenous inequality using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

Curriculum tracking, the separation of secondary school students into academic and vocational tracks, correlates positively with pretracking achievement in both British and international data. I argue that this correlation is caused by the incentives emanating from the track placement decision....

In this paper we present a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provide a novel empirical test of human capital theory. Using a sizable pension reform which shifts the retirement age between two adjacent cohorts by three years, we document...