Empirical work testing for a negative tradeoff between risk and incentives, a cornerstone of agency theory, has not had much success. Indeed, the data seem to suggest a positive relationship between measures of uncertainty and incentives, rather than the posited negative tradeoff. I argue that...

I offer theoretical and empirical observations on the oversight of public sector employees. I argue that it is unreasonable to expect that the solutions typically considered in the literature will be effective with public sector employees, because bureaucrats are especially difficult to monitor....

with the compensation policies of firms. This literature is considered from the perspective of three major theories: human capital, learning, and incentives. Considerable empirical work has addressed each of these theories with some success. However, our understanding of the effect of...