Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private-sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

Do reciprocal workers work more if their wage compares well to similar workers in the economy? Are they more satisfied with their job? Predictions vary from theories. With a survey dataset with a representative sample of the German population, I construct a reference wage and measures for...

We introduce a concept of emotions that emerge when workers compare their own performance with a given standard or with the performances of co-workers. Assuming heterogeneity among the workers the interplay of emotions and incentives is analyzed by focusing on three incentive schemes that are...

We introduce a concept of emotions that emerge when workers compare their own performance with a given standard or with the performances of co-workers. Assuming heterogeneity among the workers the interplay of emotions and incentives is analysed by focusing on three incentive schemes that are...

We suggest a parsimonious dynamic agency model in which workers have status concerns. A firm is a promotion hierarchy in which a worker's status depends on past performance. We investigate the optimality of two types of promotion hierarchies: (i) internal labor markets, in which agents have a...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form of a donation received by a...