Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...

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...

We examine differences in altruism and laziness between public sector employees and private sector employees. Our theoretical model predicts that the likelihood of public sector employment increases with a worker's altruism, and increases or decreases with a worker's laziness depending on his...

We investigate the causal effect of conversations about performance and performance pay implementing a 2x2 field experiment in a retail chain. In the performance pay treatments, managers receive a bonus for profit increases. In the performance review treatments, managers have regular meetings...

We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than...

Within a laboratory experiment we investigate a principal-agent game in which agents may, first, self-select into a group task (GT) or an individual task (IT) and, second, choose work effort. In their choices of task and effort the agents have to consider pay contracts for both tasks as offered...

We suggest a parsimonious dynamic agency model in which workers have status concerns. A firm is a promotion hierarchy in which a worker's status depends on past performance. We investigate the optimality of two types of promotion hierarchies: (i) internal labor markets, in which agents have a...

It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies think that their job is socially useless, i.e. that it makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four...

This paper examines the effect of global transition to simpler, flatter income tax systems on the size of the shadow economy. By offering a new estimation framework, the paper revives the traditional electricity consumption approach to measuring the shadow economy. It overcomes the limitations...

This study is the first to provide a systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of...