The shirking model of efficiency wages has been thought to imply that monitoring and pay are substitute instruments for motivating workers. We demonstrate that this result is not generally true. As monitoring becomes cheaper, a given effort level will be implemented with more monitoring and less...

This paper considers the opitmal incentives for motivating a risk neutral, wealth constrained agent. In particular, monitoring and pay are shown to be complementary instruments under very general conditions, extending earlier results by Allgulin and Ellingsen (1998). The paper also proves that...

This paper analyzes policies for regulating polluting firms under imperfect monitoring. The main finding is that a certain emission target is always more costly to enforce if there exists a market for emission permits than if there is none. The intuition is that a market restricts the regulatory...

The shirking model of efficiency wages has been thought to imply that monitoring and pay are substitute instruments for motivating workers. We demonstrate that this result hinges critically on restrictive assumptions regarding workers' choice of effort - for example that there are only two...