Intrinsic motivation of workers may arise from different individual motives. While some workers care about the mission of an organization and derive an intrinsic benefit from advancing this mission ("good" workers), others derive pleasure from some form of destructive or anti-social behavior...

The relationship between technical progress and price competition is a controversial issue in economics. This paper highlights the fact that investment in technical progress is an authentic type of competition which benefits the consumers rather than the industry. This type of competition exists...

This study reports results from an empirical investigation of business services sector firms that (start to) export, comparing exporters to firms that serve the national market only. We estimate identically specified empirical models using comparable enterprise level data from France, Germany,...

This paper analyzes two-stage rank-order tournaments. A principal decides (i) how to spread prize money across the two periods, (ii) how to weigh performance in the two periods when awarding the second-period prize, and (iii) whether to reveal performance after the rst period. The information...

We develop the hypotheses that the size of training firms affects long-run cumulated unemployment exposure, and that the access to large training firms depends on young workers ability and their luck to live in a region with many large and medium-sized training firms. We test these hypotheses...

This paper analyzes firm owners' incentives to implement Competition Law Compliance Programs as imperfect monitoring devices in a principal-agent setup and the interaction effects with bonus contracts. The manager chooses working effort and has the option to cartelize. The model reveals a...

Knowledge intensive business service firms (KIBS) are an important element of modern economies and thus attracting increasing interest in scientific research. In the existing literature it is argued that due to the important role of knowledge, innovation and user-producer interaction in the KIBS...

We examine product and market entry choices of New Zealand exporters, using an enterprise level dataset which links firm performance measures with detailed data on merchandise trade. We focus our enquiry not on the broad question of what determines a firm's ability to export, but on the...

This study represents a first attempt to empirically analyze the role of firm heterogeneity in regional business cycle behaviour. Working with monthly Italy's firms data and estimating a random effects ordered probit model, we first document sizable asymmetries in Northern and Southern firms...

This paper analyse how previous experience and affiliation influence individual employees but also the current employers. Knowledge can be embodied in several different forms, in individuals, in books, in machines, or in processes. Human capital refers to embodied knowledge in individuals,...