Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...

This paper explores the meaning and implications of the desire by workers for impact. We find that this impact motive can make a firm in a competitive labor market face an upward-sloping supply curve of labor, lead workers with the same characteristics but at different firms to earn different...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

Employee mobility as a conduit for knowledge transfer to a business competitor is a growing source of concern for many employers in the modern business environment where the skills, relationships, and knowledge embedded in a firm’s employees has become an important source of competitive...

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how wages are being determined in China during the reform period. The paper focuses on the development of the regulatory framework since 1978 and proceeds by examining official regulations regarding labor market institutions and wage setting, and by...

The traditional legal framework in the United States for the workplace was the master-servant doctrine, under which workers provide various services to their employers in exchange for benefits based on their status. That model has been largely supplanted by contract but, in recent decades,...

Drawing on human capital theory, strategy scholars have emphasized firm-specific human capital as a source of sustained competitive advantage. In this study, we begin to unpack the micro-foundations of firm-specific human capital by theoretically and empirically exploring when employees perceive...

A growing number of employers are attempting to restrict worker mobility through Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs) in addition to--or instead of--traditional noncompete agreements. Under TRAPs, a worker must pay to quit, purportedly for the cost of training. But many workers under...

Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...