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...

The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees'...

Supervisors occupy central roles in production and performance monitoring. We study how heterogeneity in performance evaluations across supervisors affects employee and supervisor careers and firm outcomes using data on the performance system of a Scandinavian service sector firm. We show that...

We provide evidence that promotion incentives influence the effort of public employees by studying China's system of promotions for teachers. Predictions from a tournament model of promotion are tested using retrospective panel data on primary and middle school teachers. Consistent with theory,...

A growing literature establishes that good teachers are essential for high quality educational systems. However, little is known about teachers' skills formation during their college years. In this paper we use a novel panel data set combining two standardized tests for Colombian students: one...

We estimate the effect of downsizing announcement on workplace performance using data from a German bakery chain of 193 shops. Faced with intensified competition, the firm decided to sell or close down 57 of its worst performing shops. We identify the effect of downsizing from a plausibly...

We analyze how the team formation process influences the ability composition and performance of teams, showing how self-selection and random assignment affect team performance for different tasks in two natural field experiments. We identify the collaboration intensity of the task as the key...

Observations on munition workers are organized to examine the relationship between their output each week, their working hours and days each week, and their working hours and days in adjacent weeks. The hypothesis is that workers need to recover from work and a long working week results in...

In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers' performance. We find that a 10 percent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 percent of a standard deviation. This translates to an...

We conduct a framed field experiment with 245 employed persons (no students) as subjects and a real tax, which is levied on the subjects' income from working in our real effort task. In our first three treatments, the net wage is constant but gross wages are subject to different constant...