The promotion tournament as a potentially important incentive mechanism for top management in transition economies has not been examined by the emerging literature on managerial incentives in transition economies. This paper is the first attempt to fill this important gap in the literature. The...

We study the potential benefits and mechanisms of firms' political connections by analyzing the Italian experience, where, in the early nineties, Silvio Berlusconi, a rich TV tycoon, became the leader of the conservative political coalition. Using firm-level data, we find that the 101 companies...

We experimentally investigate a simple version of Holmström?s career concerns model in which firms compete for agents in two consecutive periods. Profits of firms are determined by agents? unknown ability and the effort they choose. Before making second-period wage offers firms are informed...

The role of government shareholding in corporate performance is central to an understanding of China?s newly privatized large firms. In this paper, we analyze shareholders as agents that can both harm and benefit companies. We examine the ownership structure of 826 listed corporations and find...

We construct and analyze a unique database with 1992-99 information on privatization transactions and labor productivity for the entire surviving population of initially state-owned industrial corporations in Romania. The data permit us to describe the post-privatization ownership structure and...

Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

Theoretical analyses of (optimal) performance measures are typically performed within the realm of the linear agency model. This model implies that, for a given compensation scheme, the agent's optimal effort is unrelated to the amount of noise in the performance measure. In contrast, expectancy...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...

This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives...