We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than...

This field experiment examines output quantity and quality for workers in a data input business. We observe two sets of workers that differ in monitoring intensity as they move from time to piece rates. The application of piece rates increases quantity, and we find that the resultant quality can...

This paper explores the consequences of grouping workers into diverse divisions on the performance of employees using a dataset containing the detailed personnel records of a large U.S. firm from 1989-1994. In particular, I examine the effects of demographic dissimilarity among co-workers,...

In this paper we survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wage, employment and displacement. We start with an overview of the measurement of offshoring, organizing our discussion around the three key elements of offshoring: that it involves intermediate inputs for...

A growing literature is concerned with the effects of flexible workplace systems or High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) on wages. This paper makes use of a new employer-employee-linked panel data set for Germany to examine the effects of adopting HPWOs on wages as well as on the wage...

This paper employs an original dataset for 146 US metropolitan areas to test some propositions that characterize two different models of organizing firms and industries: the managerial firm, epitomized by the work of Alfred Chandler, and the entrepreneurial system, recently highlighted by many...

For those who monitor relative wealth accumulation and are unmoved by divine empathy, a disincentive to increase the rate of full manumission is possible. Consider slavery as overt, formal constraints to zero or even negative wealth accumulation; and consider freedom of ex-slaves as the...

We develop an oligopoly model in which firms facing unionised domestic labor markets choose between producing an intermediate good in-house and outsourcing it to a nonunionised foreign supplier that makes a relationship-specific investment in developing the intermediate. The paper sheds light on...

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...

This field experiment examines output quantity and quality for workers in a data input business. We observe two sets of workers that differ in monitoring intensity as they move from time to piece rates. The application of piece rates increases quantity, and we find that the resultant quality can...