The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction is explored theoretically and empirically. To do this, we apply a utility function that rises with the absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. It is shown that when employees can influence their wages by exerting effort, myopic utility...

Using nationally representative linked employer-employee surveys of workplaces with 50 or more employees we find the adoption of High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS) in the private sector is largely positively correlated with employee job attitudes pre-recession. However, high intensity HPWS has...

We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts...

To investigate the size and the timing of the direct impact of participatory arrangements on business performance, we assemble and analyze extraordinary daily data - for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, more than 77,000...

Most firms rely on subjective evaluations by supervisors to assess their employees' performance. This article discusses the implementation of such appraisal processes, exploring the use of multiple research methods such as the analysis of personnel records, survey data, and lab and field...

This study explores the role of salary raises and the perception of employees of these salary raises on employees' intended retention and turnover. By using a unique survey data set from an American university, this study investigates a novel hypothesis that faculty perceptions of salary raises,...

This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data to show that individual job satisfaction is higher when other workers in the same establishment are better-paid. This runs contrary to a large literature which has found evidence of income comparisons in subjective well-being. We argue that...

In this study, we explore the relation between job characteristics and employees' self-evaluations of performance in comparison to their colleagues' performance. Making use of unique individual panel data of ten large firms in Germany's chemical industry, we focus on monetary rewards (bonus...

Using ten waves (1998-2007) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper investigates the ceteris paribus association between the intensity of incentive pay, the dynamic change in bonus status and the utility derived from work. After controlling for individual heterogeneity biases,...

Based on a unique case study-dataset, the paper analyses job satisfaction and public service motivation in Germany. A special issue of the investigation is related to the evaluation of performance pay scales that were introduced some years ago to German public employees within the frame of...