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...

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts...

Work ethics affects labor supply. This idea is modeled assuming that work is habit forming. This paper introduces working habits in a neoclassical growth model and compares its outcomes with a model without habit formation. In addition, it analyzes the impact of different forms of technical...

Although demographic change leaves pay-as-you-go pension systems unsustainable, reforms, such as a higher pension age, are highly unpopular. This contribution looks into the role of intrinsic motivation as a driver for pension reform acceptance. Theoretical reasoning suggests that this driver...

Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory: effort and...

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the...

This paper analyses optimal contracts in a principal-agent model where the agent is intrinsically motivated at the outset and there is an endogenous relationship between the structure of incentive payments and intrinsic motivation (crowding effects). The analysis shows that crowding effects have...

This paper reports the results of an individual real effort laboratory experiment where subjects are paid for measured performance. Measured performance equals actual performance plus noise. We compare a stable environment where the noise is small with a volatile environment where the noise is...