CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract...

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal–agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. We show that they are an important feature in today's CEO labour market in...

Despite its potential to raise productivity, performance-related-pay (PRP) is not widespread in market-oriented economies. Furthermore, despite secular changes conducive to its take-up, there is mixed evidence as to whether it has become more prominent over time. Ours is the first paper to...

Using linked employer-employee data for all China's public listed firms over the period 2001-10, we find top executive compensation exhibits many of the traits familiar in the Western literature, although sometimes in a more muted way, and with some clear exceptions. We also find a role for...

This review focuses on pay variance across workers, employers and across time and illustrates how theories of pay determination can shed light on this variance. We discuss the limitations of the orthodox economic approach to pay setting and emphasise the importance of labour market imperfections...

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees' subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the...

The 2008 Great Recession was notable in the UK for three things: the enormity of the output shock; the muted unemployment response; and the very slow rate of recovery. We review the literature which finds most of the decline in productivity is within sector and within firm before presenting new...

We examine the impact of management practices on firm performance among SMEs in Britain over the period 2011-2014, using a unique dataset which links survey data on management practices with firm performance data from the UK's official business register. We find that SMEs are less likely to use...

The literature on the union wage premium is among the most extensive in labour economics but unions' effects on other aspects of the wage-effort bargain have received much less attention. We contribute to the literature through a study of the union premium in paid holiday entitlements, using...