The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals' effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

In many countries, schools have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by splitting up classes. While the purpose of dividing classes is clearly health-related, the process of doing so poses an interesting question: what is the best way to divide a class so as to maximize the incentive for students...

This paper develops a simple general equilibrium model which establishes a link between the patience of economic agents and the well-being of nations. We show that firms in long-term oriented countries can mitigate hold-up inefficiencies by engaging with their suppliers in relational contracting...

"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, traditional (offline) chess tournaments were prohibited and instead held online. We exploit this as a unique setting to assess the impact of moving offline tasks online on the cognitive performance of individuals. We use the Artificial Intelligence embodied...

This paper analyzes whether workplace employee representation (ER) affects the design of firm hierarchies. We rationalize the role of ER within a knowledge-based model of hierarchies, where the firm's choice of hierarchical layers depends on the trade-off between communication and knowledge...

I examine the history of employee engagement and how it has been characterised by thinkers in sociology, psychology, management and economics. I suggest that, while employers may choose to invest in employee engagement, there are alternative management strategies that may be profit-maximising. I...

This chapter analyzes the effect of intangible investment on firm efficiency with an emphasis on its software component. Stochastic production frontier approach is used to simultaneously estimate the production function and the determinants of technical efficiency in the software intensive...

I develop an intra-firm theory of group design and teamwork in the presence of peer effects. The purpose is to understand the interlinkages between intra-firm group formation and the extent of wage dispersion within the firm. Given a set of heterogeneous workers, the manager faces the challenge...

In this paper we empirically explore the "make-or-buy" decisions of peripheral services in manufacturing plants using detailed information on a data set from a new plant-level survey from 926 plants distributed in all manufacturing industries in Spain. In particular, survey respondents are asked...