The ratchet effect undermines firms' ability to pay workers a steady piece rate. Using examples from the nineteenth-century British textile industry, this paper studies the different strategies firms and workers used to enforce piece rates. The strategies depended upon the emotional responses of...

We measure the effect of profit-sharing incentive schemes on productivity in the banking sector. We use data collected from the payroll records of different (and autonomous) branches of a Québec financial cooperative. Beginning in 1994, some of these branches introduced profit-sharing...

Using a new data source on early Canadian strikes, this paper seeks to explain the determinants of strike durations, 1901-14. Three different approaches are evaluated: a screening model, a strike-waves model, and a war-of-attrition model. The results are sensitive to strike issue. For non-wage...

We formulate an empirical model of promotion with dynamic selfselection where the current promotion probability depends on the hierarchical level in the firm, individual human capital, unobserved (to the econometrician) individual specific attributes, time varying firm specific variables (firm...

This paper extends the standard work effort model by allowing workers to interact through networks. We investigate experimentally whether peer performances and peer contextual effects influence individual performances. Two types of network are considered. Participants in Recursive networks are...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of vacation leave and its relationship to hours worked and hourly wages by examining the case of Canada. Previous studies from the US, using individual level data, have revealed that annual work hours fall by around 53 hours for each...

After a merger, company officials face the challenge of making compensation schemes uniform and of redesigning teams with managers from companies with different incentives, work habits and recruiting methods. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between executive pay and performance...

After a merger, company officials face the challenge of making compensation schemes uniform and of redesigning teams with managers originating from companies with different incentives and working habits. In this paper, we offer a new way to investigate the relationship between executive pay and...

We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We...

We estimate a structural dynamic programming model of schooling decisions with unobserved heterogeneity in school ability and market ability on a sample taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Both the instantaneous utility of attending school and the wage regression...