Hartzell and Starks (HS) (2013) report that firms with more concentrated institutional investors pay executives less, and make this pay more sensitive to performance. In an extended data set covering 1992 to 2010, we find that institutional concentration has no such effects when we control for...

This paper analyzes executive compensation in German and U.S. corporations for the period 2005-2009 including the financial crisis. We analyze the impact of stock market performance and accounting-based measures of firm performance on different compensation components. We find that only firm...

This study is directly motivated by the results of Eckartz et al (2012). Subjects exerted suprisingly high efforts irrespectively of how they were compensated. This paper discusses a number of potential explanations and then it will focus on two of them: first, subjects might exert effort simply...

We compare performance in a word based creativity task under three incentive schemes: a flat fee, a linear payment and a tournament. Furthermore, we also compare performance under two control tasks (Raven's advanced progressive matrices or a number-adding task) with the same treatments. In all...

This paper studies the temporal path of subjective probability assessments. A reference-dependent agent who experiences utility from anticipation and from changes in this anticipatory emotion makes utility-maximizing assessments about his likelihood of success in a future lottery. Consistent...

Conventional wisdom suggests that a global increase in monetary rewards should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal...

The effect of intra-firm pay dispersion on work performance is controversial and the empirical evidence is mixed. High pay dispersion may act as an extra incentive for employees' effort or it may reduce motivation and team cohesiveness. These effects can also coexist and the prevalence of one...

This paper studies the relationship between a microfinance institution (MFI) and its credit officers when the latter discriminate against a group of the target population. Using survey data from Uganda, we provide evidence that credit officers are more biased against disabled borrowers than...

Organizations often use non-monetary awards to incentivize performance. Awards may affect behavior through several mechanisms: by conferring employer recognition, by enhancing social visibility, and by facilitating social comparison. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia, we...

This paper investigates whether a designer can improve both the incentive provision and the selection performance of a promotion contest by making the competition more (or less) dynamic. A comparison of static (one-stage) and dynamic (two-stage) contests reveals that this is not the case. A...