We explore data from all transition economies over nearly two decades, providing insights on the mechanisms behind labor force reallocation. We show that worker flows between jobs in different industries are rare relative to the demographic flows of youth entry and elderly exit. The same applies...

Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate...

A large body of research links performance pay to poorer worker health. The exact mechanism generating this link remains in doubt. We examine a common suspect, that performance pay causes employees to work longer hours in pursuit of higher pay. Using representative data for the UK, we...

Why do some leaders invest in significant nation-building policies and others do not? Why does nation-building occur at certain junctures in time and not others? In our research, we investigate what motivates leaders to nation build. We argue that threats to their regime motivate rulers to...

This paper analyses detailed 24-hour diary data from the United States to provide evidence on the relationship between workers' effort and well-being while at work. In doing so, we first measure workers' effort in terms of its timing, its nature, and its composition. Second, we link these three...

We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket – daily goals or a weekly goal – and within that bracket let subjects set goals for how much they want to...

Milton Friedman has famously claimed that the responsibility of a manager who is not the owner of a firm is "to conduct the business in accordance with their [the shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible." In this paper we argue that when contracts are...

A previous literature cautions that paying workers for performance might crowd out non-monetary motives to work hard. Empirical evidence from the field, however, has been based on between-subjects designs that are best suited for detecting crowding out due to low-powered incentives. High-powered...

We provide a tractable model of motivational goal bracketing by a present-biased individual, extending previous work to show that the main insights from models with rational goals carry over to a setting with non-rational goals. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make...