Empirical studies of the principal-agent relationship find that extrinsic incentives work in many instances, linking rewards to performance increases effort, but that they can also backfire, reducing effort. Intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to work to master a skill or to improve one's...

We measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: college students, non-student adults from the community surrounding the college, and adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. The use of typical...

Economic theory predicts that agents will work harder if they believe in the "mission" of the organization. Well-identified estimates of exactly how much harder they will work have been elusive, however, because agents select into jobs. We conduct a real effort experiment with participants who...

Fixed-wage workers comprise the bulk of the labor force and yet little is known about how they respond to wage changes. Given recent interest in theories of reciprocity and intrinsic motivation and their implications for effort provision, the neoclassical prediction seems less obvious today. To...

The theory of compensating differentials has proven difficult to test with observational data: the consequences of selection, unobserved firm and worker characteristics, and the broader macroeconomic environment complicate most analyses. Instead, we construct experimental, real-effort labor...