This paper reports the results of a survey of over 1500 employees who faced compulsory reductions of 10 percent in hours of work and earnings during the second half of 1985. The workers were asked how they used the free time and how they viewed the program, and their answers were analyzed in...

Using the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all...

The idea that worker utility is affected by co-worker wages has potentially broad labor market implications. In a month-long experiment with Indian manufacturing workers, we randomize whether co-workers within production units receive the same flat daily wage or different wages (according to...

We fully solve an assignment problem with heterogeneous firms and multiple heterogeneous workers whose skills are imperfect substitutes, that is, when production is submodular. We show that sorting is neither positive nor negative and is characterized sufficiently by two regions. In the first...

In this paper, we display the tools and principles of personnel economics through a series of models aimed at addressing the questions posed above. We focus on the building blocks that form the foundation of personnel economics: the assumptions that both the worker and the firm are rational...

What utility notion do self-reported well-being (SWB) questions measure? We clarify the assumptions that underlie existing applications regarding the (i) life domains, (ii) time horizons, and (iii) other-regarding preferences captured by SWB data. We ask survey respondents what they had in mind...

We study how employees learn about the salaries of their peers and managers and how their beliefs about those salaries affect their own behavior. We conducted a field experiment with a sample of 2,060 employees from a multi-billion dollar corporation. We combine rich data from surveys and...

We examine the impact of individual-level motives upon innovative effort and performance in firms. Drawing from economics and social psychology, we develop a model of the impact of individuals' motives and incentives upon their innovative effort and performance. Using data on over 11,000...

We investigate the factors driving workers' decisions to generate public goods inside an organization through a randomized solicitation of workplace improvement proposals in a medical center with 1200 employees. We find that pecuniary incentives, such as winning a prize, generate a threefold...

In this chapter, we discuss field experiments in surveys that are conducted with the purpose of learning about expectation formation and the link between expectations and behavior. We begin by reviewing the rationale for conducting experiments within surveys, rather than just relying on...