This paper develops and estimates a human capital model of wage growth based on learning by doing. Learning by doing rates are assumed to be heterogeneous and firms offer different career structures in terms of the rate of acquisition of firm specific human capital. The model is estimated using...

We show that long-term compensation is associated with higher pay in the financial industry and this association is stronger in markets with high competition for talent. We argue that this evidence supports models of competition for talent based on retention motives.

A manager and a worker are in an infinitely repeated relationship in which the manager privately observes her opportunity costs of paying the worker. We show that the optimal relational contract generates periodic conflicts during which effort and expected profits decline gradually but recover...

Conventional wisdom suggests that a global increase in monetary rewards should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal...

In this paper I explore optimal employment contract design in a random search framework, where workers search on and off the job for employment opportunities similar to that of Lentz (2010) and Bagger and Lentz (2013). The worker determines the frequency by which employment opportunities arrive...

This paper compares two alternative incentive schemes, performance-related pay (PRP) and relative performance evaluation (RPE), in a differentiated duopoly where institutional features constrain firms to pay workers a given salary. It is shown that RPE endogenously arises as the optimal choice...

The theoretical result according to which the wage is higher when bargaining and efficiency wages interact, is tested by estimating a formally derived wage equation on an Italian firm-level panel from 1990 to 1999. The 1993 July Agreement, which fostered the adoption of decentralised incentive...

We show that establishing an internal labor market by offering combined contracts across hierarchy levels strictly dominates external recruitment when workers are homogeneous. The reason is that only an internal labor market can exploit higher tier rents for incentive provision on lower tiers....

The level of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay responds asymmetrically to good and bad news about the CEO's ability. The average CEO captures approximately half of the surpluses from good news, implying CEOs and shareholders have roughly equal bargaining power. In contrast, the average CEO bears...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of optimal executive compensation in a setting where managers are in a position to manipulate short-term stock prices, and managers' propensity to manipulate is uncertain. Stock-based incentives elicit not only productive effort, but also costly...