Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of...

Recent thinking has emphasized the importance of consistency in a firm?s compensation policy. By starting from Williamson?s ideas about idiosyncratic exchange, this view can be supplied with some theoretical foundation. At the same time, the consistency view can be applied to a number of...

Internal organization relies heavily on psychological consistency requirements. This thought has been emphasized in modern compensation theory, but has not been extended to organization theory. The perspective sheds new light on several topics in the theory of the firm, like the boundaries of...

Most of the literature on remittances has focused on their implications for the welfare of family members in the country of origin and has disregarded the possibility for remittances to trigger chain migration. In this paper, we address this issue with the use of longitudinal data from Bosnia...

Information about past performance has been found to sometimes improve and sometimes worsen subsequent performance. Two factors may help to explain this puzzle: which aspect of one's past performance the information refers to and when it is revealed. In a field experiment in secondary schools,...

We study attitudes to education among English adolescents. Using PISA data, we show there is considerable variation in these attitudes depending on background: immigrant students have substantially and significantly more positive attitudes to school than native children, a difference that...