We investigate whether and how social ties affect performance in teams by implementing a field experiment in which a sample of undergraduate students are randomly assigned to either teams composed by friends or teams composed by individuals not linked by friendship relationships. Students...

We present a model of wage contract violation that implies a possibility of multiple equilibria in the level of arrears. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the costs of late payment faced by other employers operating in the same labor market, resulting in a network...

Why does individual performance pay seem to prevail in human capital intensive industries? We present a model that may explain this. In a repeated game model of relational contracting, we analyze the conditions for implementing peer dependent incentive regimes when agents possess indispensable...

Young professionals typically do not enter into life-long employment relations with a single firm. Therefore, future employers can learn about individuals' abilities from the observable facts regarding earlier work relations. We show that these informational spill-overs have profound...

Can enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices'...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent's type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...

In many economic situations several principals contract with the same agents sequentially. Asymmetric learning about agents' abilities provides the first principal with an informational advantage and has profound implications for the design of incentive contracts. We show that the principal...

The relationship between executive pay and corporate financial performance con-tinues to attract wide academic, media and policy attention. The very high salariesenjoyed by senior executives in corporations primarily in the North American coun-tries are often contrasted with the relatively low...

Empfehlungen zur Beschränkung von Abfindungen an vorzeitig ausscheidende Vorstandsmitglieder werden häufig nicht eingehalten. Solange Vorstandsmitglieder nicht gegen ihren Willen entlassen werden dürfen, ist eine Beschränkung der Abfindungen weder im Interesse der Unternehmen noch effizient....

Trust between parties should drive the negotiation and design of contract: if parties did not trust each others' reaction to unplanned events, they might agree to pay higher costs of negotiation to complete contracts. Using a unique sample of U.S. principal-agent consulting contracts and a...