It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies think that their job is socially useless, i.e. that it makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four...

A vast labor literature has found evidence of a "glass ceiling", whereby women are under-represented among senior management. A key question remains the extent to which this reflects unobserved differences in productivity, preferences, prejudice, or systematically biased beliefs about the...

A principal often needs to match agents to perform coordinated tasks, but agents can quit or slack off if they dislike their match. We study two prevalent approaches for matching within organizations: Centralized assignment by firm leaders and self-organization through market-like mechanisms. We...

Online labour platforms matching labour supply and demand are profoundly modifying the world of work. Businesses use them to outsource tasks to a world-wide pool of workers; while workers can access work opportunities transcending national boundaries. Increasingly, workers are located in...

We investigate the causal effect of conversations about performance and performance pay implementing a 2x2 field experiment in a retail chain. In the performance pay treatments, managers receive a bonus for profit increases. In the performance review treatments, managers have regular meetings...

The supply of women into senior management has changed little despite well-intentioned efforts. We argue that the biggest effect is from supply-side factors that inhibit females' decision to enter competitions: Women are under-confident about winning, men are over-confident; women are more risk...

We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than...

Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assigned teammates affect an individual worker's behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme, and b) how such effects...

We suggest a parsimonious dynamic agency model in which workers have status concerns. A firm is a promotion hierarchy in which a worker's status depends on past performance. We investigate the optimality of two types of promotion hierarchies: (i) internal labor markets, in which agents have a...

This field experiment examines output quantity and quality for workers in a data input business. We observe two sets of workers that differ in monitoring intensity as they move from time to piece rates. The application of piece rates increases quantity, and we find that the resultant quality can...