This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272710000721">'Journal of Public Economics'</A>. The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into...</a>

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

We conduct a field experiment in a large retail chain to test basic predictions of tournament theory regarding prize spread and noise. A random subset of the 208 stores participates in two-stage elimination tournaments. Tournaments differ in the distribution of prize money across winners of the...

We conduct a field experiment among 189 stores of a retail chain to study dynamic incentive effects of relative performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores from the control group over the course of four weeks....

This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Labor Economics</I>, 2013, 32(2), 305-326.<P> We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find...</p></i>

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly...

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store’s manager...