The simple trade-off between incentive and risk, which is crucial to the agency problem, is not a sufficient explanation for the ineffectiveness of a specific output-related pay such as the contract system adopted in the US iron and steel industry during the second half of the...

This paper investigates the historical accounts of the ineffectiveness of the contract system in the US iron and steel industry during the second half of the nineteenth-century. The high rate of technological innovation, along with the extensive bargaining power of the old industrial crafts,...

Lliterature on Taylorism has surprisingly ignored the role of its payment systems, while the results achieved on Ford's five-dollar day programme appear contradictory and sometimes isolated from the organisational change simultaneously undertaken. I seek to fill these theoretical gaps. I provide...

The article investigates the equilibrium conditions in the choice between legally binding contracts, which are costly to verify and enforce, and non-binding contracts, which simply rely on trust as an enforcement mechanism, in both one-shot and repeated interactions. The returns to effort appear...

This paper extends the empirical debate on the effects of corruption on environmental degradation by considering a recently available measure of environmental quality, the Environmental Performance Index. This indicator is more comprehensive than the measures of air pollutant emissions commonly...

Corruption can be generally intended as an (illicit) exchange between a member of an organization and another subject at the expense of either the organization itself or the rights of others, in which acts of power in contrast with official duty are exchanged for personal advantage. This general...

This paper provides a within-country analysis of the impact of corruption on economic growth using a panel of Italian regions from 1968 to 2011 through a robust measure of corruption. This measure is averaged over five-year periods to reduce short-run fluctuations and probable delayed effects....

This study reviews the economic analysis of the causes of corruption and its effects on economic performance. It consists of both an updated version of previous surveys and a rapid guide to the main achievements on this topic. Although economists have devoted a lot of attention to corruption,...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the current cost of protection rackets in Sicily. By means of a database constructed on judicial evidence, it has been possible to come up with an estimate of the average and total costs of the protection-money system, as well as finding out in which...