We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

This paper considers a model in which the unemployed have to incur a cost to maintain their skills. If whether they have done so is not observable, the economy has multiple equilibrium supported by self-fulfilling beliefs on the part of the employers. There is a unique steady state equilibrium...

This paper presents a one-sided incomplete (asymmetric) information bargaining game in a dynamic general equilibrium framework. The model predicts business cycle movements in the economy with persistence mechanism arising from asymmetric information and search. The employment level is...

Most managers enjoy considerable discretion and protection from possible interventions which enables them to look after their own interests. This is often attributed to the dispersion of shareholders and regulations that deter effective outside interventions. This paper presents a model that has...

This paper shows that search in the labor market has important effects on accumulation decisions. In a labor market characterized by search, employment contracts are naturally incomplete and this creates a wedge between the rates of return and marginal products of both human and physical...

In the presence of labor market imperfections, workers do not receive their full marginal product and the skill level of the workforce becomes a public good from which all firms benefit. As a result, the adoption of an innovation that increases the non-firm specific human capital of a worker...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the...

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers' behaviour is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in...