We evaluate the effects of employer-provided formal training on employee suggestions for productivity improvements and on promotions among male blue-collar workers. More than twenty years of personnel data of four entry cohorts in a German company allow us to address issues such as unobserved...

Although a broad field of literature on incentive theory exists, employer-provided tangible goods (hereafter called benefits) have so far been neglected by economic research. A remarkable exception is an empirical study by Oyer (2008). In our study, we test some of his findings by drawing on a...

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a...

Using a German employer-employee matched panel data set this paper examines the effects of High Performance Workplace Systems (HPWSs) on labor productivity (defined as sales per worker) and labor efficiency (defined as the inverse of unit labor costs). The estimation results indicate that simple...

We econometrically evaluate the performance effects of a six month e-learning programme in a large retail chain with monthly data on sales revenue, for four years using panel regressions. Participants in early cohorts show positive performance effects during training periods that depreciate...

The theoretical probation literature shows that individuals have incentives to mimick "good workers" during periods of employment probation. This study empirically tests at the example of absence behavior, whether such behavioral responses to the incentives of probation periods exist. We find...

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...

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...

The present paper aims to contribute to the literature on the foundations of incomplete contracts by providing conditions under which simple delegation of authority is the solution to the complete-contracting problem of the parties. We consider a hold-up framework where both parties profit from...

We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long lived principal faces a series of short lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game ala Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias,...