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...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

In a field experiment of age discrimination, pairs of men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired, by email, about employment as waiters in twenty five Spanish towns. Discrimination against the older waiters, corresponded to the highest rates ever recorded anywhere, by written tests, for...

Evidence on schools' performance is confined to comparisons across schools, usually based on value-added measures. We adopt an alternative approach comparing schools to observationally equivalent workplaces in the rest of the British economy using measures of workplace performance that are...

Social preference research has received considerable attention among economists in recent years. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially problematic as students...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are...

We document the importance of negatively reciprocal inclinations in labor relationships by showing that a retrenchment of pension rights, which is perceived as unfair, causes a larger reduction in job motivation the stronger workers' negatively reciprocal inclinations are. We exploit unique...

Empirical work on Akerlof's theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

There is now an extensive literature on "gift exchange" showing that when principals and agents can trade "gifts" (rewards that should not emerge in a competitive equilibrium), exchange becomes more efficient. However, it is not obvious how gift exchange should be organized if the principal's...

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of unannounced, public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers...