We analyze the effect of investments in corporate social responsibility(CSR) on workers’ motivation. In our experiment, a gift exchange game variant,CSR is captured by donating a certain share of profits to a charity. Weare testing for CSR effects by varying the possible share of profits given...

Human capital and deferred compensation might explain why firms employ but do nothire older workers. Adjustments of wage-tenure profiles for older new entrants areexplored in the context of deferred compensation. From an equity theory perspective,such adjustments might lead to adverse incentive...

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, whichprovides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use thelessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance inpractice....

This paper exploits a quasi-experimental setting to estimate the impact that a multi-dimensional group incentive scheme had on branch performance in a large distribution firm. The scheme, which is based on the Balanced Scorecard, was implemented in all branches in one division, but not in another...

In Germany, the employment response to the post-2007 crisis has been muted compared toother industrialized countries. Despite a large drop in output, employment has hardlychanged. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of German firms’ labor demand duringthe crisis using a firm-level panel...

The paper investigates the impact of ownership concentration on GDP growth, for a sample of 18 OECD countries over the period 1980 to 2004. The econometric analysis shows that more concentrated ownership can speed up growth, for countries approaching the technological frontier, provided that...

This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. Theeffects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but verylittle of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The resultsof this paper show that...

Many contributions suggest that earnings instability has increased during the 1980s and1990s. This paper develops and estimates an on-the-job search model of the labor market tostudy the contribution of wage inequality and job mobility in explaining earnings instability. Tostudy the evolution...