The theoretical probation literature shows that individuals have incentives to mimick "good workers" during periods of employment probation. This study empirically tests at the example of absence behavior, whether such behavioral responses to the incentives of probation periods exist. We find...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms? hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted. The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. This view is unnecessary and inconsistent with the...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of...

Temporary contracts provide employers with a tool to screen potential new employees and have been shown to provide "stepping stones" into permanent employment for workers. For both reasons workers on temporary contracts have an incentive to provide more effort than permanent employees. Using...

We analyze the impact of three different transfer fee systems on payoffs, contract lengths, training and effort incentives in European football. The different regimes, being used until 1995 (?Pre-Bosman? or P), currently in use (?Bosman? or B), and recently approved (?Monti? or M) differ with...

Many experiments indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self interest, but also care about the well being of others. In this paper we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion)....

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete. We report a...

We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this 'overjustification...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...