Most studies of the impact of unions use individual rather than establishment level data. In this paper, we combine information on union organizing activity from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board Representation Case files with information on a wide range of economic variables form the U.S....

We develop and test a model of the patenting and R&D decisions of an innovating firm whose scientist-employees sometimes quit to join or start a rival. In our model, the innovating firm patents to protect itself from its employees. We show theoretically that the risk of a scientist's departure...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the 'shadow prices' for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers' intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients from...

Using a variety of data sources, the contributors explore how performance standards and incentives affect the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants.

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large government organization that is divided into independent pools of agencies. Each pool distributes performance awards to the agencies it supervises, subject to two constraints: the awards cannot be negative and the sum of the awards cannot...

This Paper studies a particular kind of gaming response to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the ‘shadow prices’ for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers’ intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients...

It has long been recognized that worker wages and possibly productivity are higher in large firms. Moreover, at least since Schumpeter (1942) economists have been interested in the relative efficiency of large firms in the research and development enterprise. This paper uses longitudinal...

An important lesson from the incentive literature is that explicit incentives may elicit dysfunctional and unintended responses, also known as gaming responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behavior is typically hidden from the...