Due to the limited availability of firm-level compensation data, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of compensation plans on personal productivity. We study an international law firm that moves from high-powered individual incentives towards incentives for "leadership" activities...

Three types of pay-setting methods are piece rates (pay mechanically linked to output), merit pay (pay based on less formal judgments by one's supervisor), and standard rates (pay based on one's job classification and perhaps seniority, but not directly on performance). Firms' choice among...

We document that an increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonuses, commissions, or piece-rates. We find that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed (by the econometrician) and unobserved...

Cap and trade programs have considerable heterogeneity in permit validity and compliance timing. For example, permits have different validity across time (e.g., banking, borrowing, and seasons) and space (e.g., zonal restrictions), and compliance timing can be annual, in overlapping cycles, or...

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed...

We argue that strategic interactions between firms in an oligopoly can explain the puzzling lack of high-powered incentives in executive compensation contracts written by shareholders whose objective is to maximize the value of their shares. We derive the optimal compensation contracts for...