Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

Fringe benefits of various kinds have become an essential element of modern labour market mechanisms. Firms offer transport-related fringe benefits such as transport subsidies (company cars, travel and parking subsidies) and relocation subsidies to job applicants. The spatial implications of...

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between pay and performance. Economic and psychological theories predict that the design and implementation of a performance measurement and compensation system affect the motivation of employees. Our survey results demonstrate a positive...

Reimbursement of commuting costs by employers has attracted little attention from economists. We develop a theoretical model of a monopsonistic employer who determines an optimal recruitment policy in a spatial labour market with search frictions and show that partial reimbursement of commuting...

In Europe, company cars are offered by employers as fringe benefits to their employees at a lower price than employees pay in the car market, mainly due to favourable taxation of company cars. We analyse the welfare effects of favourable taxation of company cars for the Netherlands. The...

This paper studies wage structure characteristics and their incentive effects within one firm. Based on personnel records and an employee survey, we provide evidence that wages are attached to jobs and that promotions play a dominant role as a wage determinant. We furthermore show that a...

This paper employs survey data on the reasons to quit of Dutch job changers who entered or left a public sector job in 2001. We show that workers' reasons to quit their public sector job influence their decision to stay in or leave their industry of employment. A bad experience with, for...

A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. This article uses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contracts when a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker's participation constraint and so calls...

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,...