Effective monitoring requires proper incentives and detection skill. Detection skills depend on the extent of specialization in monitoring and on the number of agents to be supervised. This paper demonstrates that hierarchy and monitoring of monitors can provide the necessary incentives for the...

International comparative studies of student performance have initiated political discussions in countries all over the world on how to improve the educational achievement of students. The empirical evidence suggests that central exams help to achieve higher student performance. Central exams...

Für die Prinzipal-Agenten-Theorie ist es ein weitgehend ungelöstes Rätsel, warum reale Arbeitsverträge sehr geringe monetäre Leistungsanreize spezifizieren. In dieser Arbeit wird auf der Grundlage des Prinzipal-Agenten-Ansatzes ein Modell entwickelt, dass sowohl Fixlohnverträge als auch...

Für die Prinzipal-Agenten-Theorie ist es ein weitgehend ungelöstes Rätsel, warum reale Arbeitsverträge sehr geringe monetäre Leistungsanreize spezifizieren. In dieser Arbeit wird auf der Grundlage des Prinzipal-Agenten-Ansatzes ein Modell entwickelt, dass Fixlohnverträge erklären kann....

This paper shows that monitoring too much a partner in the initial phase of a relationship may not be optimal if the goal is to determine his loyalty to the match and if the cost of ending the relationship increases over time. The intuition is simple: by monitoring too much we learn less on how...

We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model for Germany and study...

While confounding factors typically jeopardize the possibility to use observational data to measure peer effects, field experiments offer the possibility to obtain clean evidence. In this paper we measure the output of four randomly selected groups of individuals who were asked to fill letters...

We show experimentally that a principal?s distrust in the voluntary performance of an agent has a negative impact on the agent?s motivation to perform well. Before the agent chooses his performance, the principal in our experiment decides whether he wants to restrict the agents? choice set by...